The Rapture (5 page)

When I arrive home from the café. later that afternoon, I see the woman again. She's standing on the pavement opposite my flat, her hands hanging loosely at her sides. She's wearing a T-shirt and linen trousers. I feel her watching me but I refrain from looking directly back at her. During the whole of my transfer out of the car, she doesn't shift. Once in the house, I glance at her through the window. She is still standing there, motionless, like a mannequin on guard duty.

I close the blind to banish her but I fail. Because whether or not it was her aim, she has succeeded in unsettling me.

That night, I lie awake thinking, unable to sleep. Harish Modak is right, I decide, that humans are short-termists by nature, and only far-sighted political vision can halt the damage to the biosphere. But part of me - the part that has got me this far, despite all that has happened - refuses to agree with him that such vision will never come into being. I didn't survive a horrific car accident in order to let Washington, Delhi and Beijing cook me to death.
Cuando te tengo a ti vida, cuanto te quiera
, I murmur: my tiny foreign mantra of cheer. I'm normally good at switching off from work, but Bethany Krall pesters her way in. The hoarse grate of her voice in my ear. Her wayward, carefully enunciated menace.
You had two hearts and one was gone. So someone died
. I keep remembering the feel of her fingers on my pulse. Like a doctor who meant me no good.

My colleague Dr Hussan Ehmet is a melancholy Turkish Cypriot with sloping shoulders and badly groomed hair, whose claim to professional fame is a study of mass hysteria and religious cults in the Far East, soon to be published as an academic book by Oxford University Press. Although he is not the most charming of men, he charms me. I like the way he wears his loneliness and erudition on his sleeve, the way he gives a small 'heh' when he's cracked a medic's dry almost-joke.

'Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights. Heh. Bethany's is the conflict of two rights. Hers and ours. What puts her into a state approximating to happiness, or perhaps even transient bliss, heh, is a regular dose of electricity applied directly to the brain. The interesting thing is, the rather
remarkable
thing is, she now requests it herself,' he tells me over an execrable canteen lunch. 'She can feel its beneficial effects. I suspect that within a few months, the suppressed memories will start coming back. Some of these children, they are basically like cats and dogs. You know. Carnivorous animals, sometimes they eat grass to help their digestion. They know what they need when they're sick, heh. It's instinct.' It strikes me as a curiously crass thing for a psychiatrist to say, especially one who can quote Hegel at you in the lunch queue, but perhaps he is right. 'She's unpopular with the therapists because she's intuitive. She picks up on moods. Her perceptions can seem a little, what-is-the-word,
uncanny
at times. It disturbs people.' I try to look surprised, wryly amused, as though I am not implicated. I don't know if I succeed. 'Like Joy McConey. Poor woman.'

'What was her relationship with Bethany like?' I ask, curious that he has mentioned my predecessor because her name tends to go unspoken at Oxsmith.

'Understandably troubled,' says Dr Ehmet. But now he looks embarrassed. He regrets having spoken.

'But why?'
I warned her about what would happen.
'Is Joy . . .ill?'

He nudges at a falafel with his fork. 'In a manner of speaking. Joy's circumstances were very unfortunate,' he mumbles. 'She drew - er, unprofessional conclusions about Bethany.'

'Such as?'

But he shakes his head, splits his falafel, and contemplates its mild protein steam. 'We are all hoping Joy will return, so you will understand if I don't say more.'

I nod to acknowledge this. 'But what about you? Where do you stand with Bethany?'

'I'm purely on the, er, electrical side in this case. Heh. So I don't have to listen to her,' he says, squashing the falafel with his fork so that its grains mash up through the tines. 'I just give her the volts.'

The Quiet Room is clinic-white. I'm in the adjoining observation annexe where, through the thick glass screen, I am about to witness Bethany having ECT. Dr Ehmet has been explaining that the procedure, once disturbing, has become fairly banal to watch, thanks to the general anaesthetic and muscle relaxant. 'Oh yes, the days of high drama are long gone, heh. No more violent fitting. No more patients swallowing their tongues or spitting out their teeth.' He sounds a little nostalgic about it. 'It's still controversial because there's memory loss. And the fact is, still no one knows why it works. One theory says that the shock stimulates the neuroendocrine system, and balances the stress hormones. Then there's another one that says it's not about hormones being rearranged, but the chemicals in the brain. Others reckon it's just wiping out brain cells. But I think if they are being wiped out, they're being renewed. More
constructively.'

I don't recognise Bethany at first, when a nurse wheels her in on a trolley bed. She's clad in a white hospital gown and her hair is scraped back from her face. Without make-up she looks even younger. Spotting me at the far end of the room, she points at her forehead, sketches a swift lightning-bolt in the air, and smiles the triumphant smile of a terrorist whose demands are being fully met.

The ECT machine itself is unspectacular, consisting of a rectangular box with coloured wires emerging, and a dial.

'It is time for the IV now, Bethany,' says Dr Ehmet. It's matter-of-fact: they have clearly done this many times before. She proffers her skinny little arm. The criss-cross of razor slashes goes all the way up. 'I'm putting in an IV of Brevital,' Ehmet explains, catching my eye and mouthing clearly. 'An anaesthetic.'

As it goes in, Bethany's eyelids close like those of certain dolls I had as a child, comatose the moment they horizontalise. Her face, normally volatile, instantly relaxes, as though unconsciousness has forced her features to sign a temporary peace accord with one another. The nurse inserts a new IV. 'A muscle relaxant,' indicates Dr Ehmet. 'To prevent broken bones and cracked vertebrae. It's a seizure we're giving her after all.' Dr Ehmet is one of those men who enjoys conveying information. Since I've already read about the procedure on the web, he hasn't yet told me anything I don't know, but I'm happy to see the theory put into practice, and for him to talk me through it. The nurse wipes Bethany's forehead with a damp cloth, then gently parts her lips and inserts a rubber mouth-guard over her teeth - 'to prevent tongue damage,' Dr Ehmet explains, as he applies gel to two padded electrodes, and fits a breathing mask over her nose and mouth. On the anaesthetist's nod, he applies the pads to her temples and holds them in place. Nothing visible happens.

'I'm, heh, shooting an electric current into her brain now. A level-two dose, stimulating a grand-mal seizure that will last for precisely ten seconds. It's all in the timing.'

Although there's still no sign that anything has happened - no convulsions, no twitching, no noise - an unexpected wave of revulsion brings me close to gagging. It's like watching one of those anti-vivisection campaigns showing grainy footage of a tiny tragic macaque monkey pinned to a slab. Dr Ehmet has a professional eye on the digital clock. 'And then release.'

He removes the electrodes: under the sheet, Bethany's toes curl and flex, reminding me of speeded-up footage of bracken unfurling. Dr Ehmet gestures to me to come closer. Positioning myself next to Bethany's head, I am oddly tempted to touch her brow, where the pads went, but I resist the urge.

'There we are. Logged off,' says Ehmet. 'It's only a light anaesthetic so she'll wake in a couple of minutes. She won't look a million dollars, as they say. Or should it be euros? Heh. But she'll feel like new.'

Five minutes later Bethany's eyes flick open and she groans, then yawns. Just as Dr Ehmet predicted, she does not look a million, in any denomination. In fact, she's monstrous: ragged and bleary and punch-drunk, a preview of herself at forty. Her pupils are wildly dilated and when she sits up, groggily, she holds her head as if her sense of balance is impaired.

'Bethany, do you know my name?' I ask.

Memory loss is the most significant side-effect of the procedure. Sure enough, Bethany doesn't recall who I am. It doesn't appear to bother her.

'I saw this giant whirlpool made of wind,' she croaks. 'It was fucking incredible.' The procedure seems to have carried her voice down an octave so that it sounds like it's emerging from a toilet or a cave.

'Where?'

She seems muddled. 'The clouds. They start spiralling. And then on a map. The destruction's, like, mega. Write this down. Write down, the fall of Jesus Christ.'

'What does that mean to you?'

She shakes her head on the pillow.
'And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire
. But you wait till you see it, man.' She blinks. 'Behold, the Lord maketh the Earth empty, and maketh it waste, and turneth it upside down, and scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof.'

'Where do you remember that from, Bethany?'

'Hey, I know who you are. You're Mrs Bibble Babble. Mrs How-does-it-make-you-feel. Listen. This is what you don't get. This isn't about what I'm
feeling
. It's about what's going to happen. Hey. Bring me that.'

She points to the wall, where a flimsy paper calendar hangs. I hesitate, then reach for a corner and pull it down.

'Flip through to July,' she commands. I do what she asks, then hand it to her. 'There,' she says, pointing to a square. 'The twenty-ninth. It's going to be a big day.' She squints into the square as though it's a tiny window through which she is seeing the far distance. 'South America. Brazil. Hurricane. Whoosh. Up it goes and then it all comes down. A whole lot of people are going to get wiped out. Kapoom. Along with their . . . scooters and their chicken coops and their crap fencing and their screaming munch-kins and their pet dog Fuckface.'

'How do you know this is going to happen?'

'Because I saw it,
duh
. Just now.'

'It sounds like it might be frightening.'

She shrugs. 'Whatever.'

'What do you mean?'

'For the people who die it is. Not for me. I mean, I don't give a shit about them. Hey. I
want
them to die The planet's overpopulated, right?' This sounds suspiciously like the dogma I have just spent a large part of my weekend mulling over.
The fewer the merrier. More oxygen for the rest of us. Organic diseases.

'Have you heard of the Planetarians?' I ask.

'The who?'

'It's an eco-movement.'

She looks either baffled or bored, it's hard to tell: she clearly doesn't know who they are, or can't remember, or doesn't care. Instead, on she talks, at high speed, about magma and trapped gas beneath the Earth's crust, and a volcano gearing up for an eruption. I nod, and say little. I'm remembering there's a word in Russian,
izgoy
, that describes someone with a flaw which makes them singularly unfit to perform their professional role. A blocked writer, a lascivious priest, a drunken chauffeur. As a screwed-up therapist, someone like me should not be working at all. Not yet. Not in my line of business. It is far too soon. Anyone can tell you that. Bethany, with her Competence Scale, already has. But here I am. An
izgoy.

Trying to help a girl who has risen from the dead, bursting with ideas.

'October the twelfth, that's when the shit hits the fan,' she is saying, flicking through the calendar. 'Write that down, too. Mark it on the calendar. You got a pen?'

'I'm afraid not.'

'Well, remember it then. That's what I do. And write down about the hurricane. Rio, on July the twenty-ninth. It's got to go in the notebook,' she grins. The braces on her teeth flash.

I can see her moving on to the next stage, an adult facility like St Denis or Carver Place or worse, Kiddup Manor, and spooling out the rest of her existence there, with the occasional incident of violence, and the odd suicide attempt. Yet sometimes you want to help someone, despite yourself and what you have become, even if you know they are beyond it, and so are you; no remedy you can invent will change their trajectory: the fuse was lit long ago. But you try. Again and again you try, your life on a loop, a wheel. And when you get home you finish the bottle of Australian wine under the blank gaze of Frida Kahlo with her pet monkey and her dead hummingbird and her bad-luck cat and her necklace of thorns, and you leaf through the art books whose images still manage to flood your heart and brain, and drink your way into darkness and dream that you are flying in the stratosphere and having sex with a man you must not think about under any circumstances because the past, and the future it once held in embryo, has been wiped out.

And then you wake.

Chapter Three

Self-analysis is a bad habit I indulge in regularly, under the guise of 'working on myself'. It's clear that in moving to the only place that will have me, but where I have no friends, I have been trying to prove something. But what? My independence? My ability to continue business as usual? The fact that I can leave my previous life behind? My own perversity? When I look at what is happening in the world I wonder: am I projecting my own internal dramas on the social landscape, or is there actually an atmosphere of recklessness in these long, overheated summer weeks? A generalised malaise that seems to go above and beyond the norm, not just in Europe but across the whole globe, a globe that is over-freighted, claustrophobic, product-mad, too dense for its own mass? I would like to stop reading the papers and watching the TV news but I'm increasingly addicted to knowing the extent of the horror. World preoccupations remain an uneasy, toxic mix: money (too little of it), disease (too much), territorial aggression, racist executions, spiralling oil prices, web stalkers, Islamist terror, the new fly-borne malaria, melting ice caps, aggressive cults in China, carbon credit fraud, the rise of the Planetarians, the rampant spread of 'intelligent design' teaching in schools, contraception, overpopulation, and the new, 'proud-to-be-a-fundamentalist' movement. In Britain alone there are now fifty thousand Faith Wave churches, of the kind Bethany was raised in; ten years ago, there were five hundred. Meanwhile in Iran and Israel the violence is an open wound on TV, so predictable in its bloodiness that the mutilated children and howling women become a spectacle you shudder at briefly before zapping over to some Japanese game show. The well-meaning optimism of those entertainment programmes, with their perky nerdiness and banana-skin tomfoolery, provides a counterpoint to the real-world grief. Their crude hilarities flit through my head while I swim my laps, like my Spanish Kahlo mantra, or fragments of some absurd erotic fantasy, poignantly irrelevant.

When I arrive for our next session in the art room Bethany is in full manic flood, ranting at the thickset female nurse about some snail-shells missing from her bedside drawer. Still unsettled by her ability to perceive and target my vulnerabilities, I am on my guard and keen to keep a distance. 'There were twenty-five and now there are only fucking twenty!' she shouts. 'Can you explain that? How about this: Heidi's a fucking klepto. She nicks things, everyone knows it, it's her fucking diagnosis! Hey, there's this earthquake that's going to destroy Istanbul,' she says, spotting me come in. The stolen shells forgotten, she pursues her theme: the quake measures 'seven point blah-blah', and it'll kill 'zillions'. Oh, and there's a volcano about to blow on an island she can't name somewhere in the Pacific - though if she had a map, she'd show me. A hurricane in the south Atlantic will zap in on the twenty-ninth of this month. 'Kapoom! And that tornado that's just attacked the American Midwest, I predicted that, Wheels. And I have documentation to prove it,' she says elatedly, waving a large red-and-black notebook at me. 'Yay! Proof positive! Evidence of things not seen!'

'Can I have a look?' She hands it to me. 'Shall I start at the beginning?'

She laughs. 'You can start anywhere. Hey, hold it upside down, for all I care. It's not like you're going to believe it.'

I flip the notebook open in the middle and see a jumble of images tattooed on to the page in dark pencil and biro, gouged deep, and overlapping one another in a whirling palimpsest. But despite the unruliness she draws with confidence and skill. There are cloud formations, waves and rocky landscapes, vigorous lines with shadows darkly cross-hatched. Leafing through slowly, I also get the impression, from the multiple arrows flying in all directions, that Bethany imagines a scientific basis to these scenes. Her schoolteachers reported that she had an aptitude for science, art and geography. You sense, in this travesty of her three favourite subjects, the tattered remains of an enquiring mind fed a solid educational diet. The images are annotated with her tiny spider's writing, which stumbles its way across the page haphazardly.
Pressure building east west surge. Like at hief in the-night They shall be caught up.

'Can you talk me through what's going on here?'

She chuckles. 'Talk you through Armageddon? Talk you through Ezekiel? I like the idea of them naming a city after me one day. Bethanyville. Or even a country. Hey, I like that. Bethanyland.'

Grandiosity: worth exploring. Patients are like tangled balls of string. You have to find the end of the string and tease the rest out. Work at it until the ball starts to unwind. Then see where it rolls. Off the edge of something, usually.

'Do you think you're special in some way, Bethany? Do you feel you might have special powers?'

She laughs. 'Like I've been saying to everyone all along, duh. I can see the future.'

'What do you see there?'

She looks at me sideways, suddenly furtive. 'Bethanyland.'

'What's Bethanyland like?'

'It sucks. It's a completely fucked-up place. The trees are all burned. Everything's poisonous. There's a lake there.'

'Lake Bethany?'

'You wouldn't want to swim in it. All the fish are dead and there are mosquitoes buzzing around everywhere, the kind that give you malaria. You wouldn't exactly be in your element there, Wheels. But you'd have no choice. No one would. You'd be lucky to be alive. You'd have to get used to canned food. Bring a tin opener.'

'A bleak landscape.'

'But you know something? You're so on the wrong track. You're so lost it hurts. I told you, I can feel things happening. Joy McConey knew I was right.' I remember my predecessor's leaving card. To Joy.
Who truly believed
. Although the signature was illegible, it's clear that the handwriting in Bethany's notebook - small, frantic - is the same. I feel a frisson of disgust. Did Joy actually pore through Bethany's scribblings, and find method in her madness? If she did, and came to believe in Bethany's so-called predictions, no wonder she has had to take time out.

'How was it for you when Joy left?'

She shrugs. 'It was no big deal,' she says, flipping through the notebook to reveal several diagrams of what look like cloud movements. 'She wouldn't help me to get out of here, so from my point of view she could get fucked. But it was tough on her.' She smiles slyly. 'You know, losing the pleasure of my company? And between you and me, I think she got a bit paranoid. I know what Joy McConey's thinking now. She's thinking that I've got my revenge.'

I wait for more, but she seems absorbed in her papers. There are drawings of volcanoes spewing fire, and more sketches of cyclones, with arrows shooting this way and that. It strikes me, not for the first time, that the disturbed imagination has fewer choices of route than one might think. She points to a huge swirl. 'I can see the way everything flows. Blood and water and magma and air. I can see everything move. I can feel what's happened to you, from your blood. All of it.' He eyes glitter. 'It's only the electricity that's keeping me alive. I've told everyone what's happening. I've told you. But Joy
listened
. Hey. Guess how many stars I gave her. Joy McConey, you leave Oxsmith with a grand total of nine out of ten!'

I feel oddly slapped. 'I
'm
listening.'

'No you're not. But hey. You will be. There's going to be a tornado in Scotland any day now. Check it out. And the big one's on its way. The Tribulation starts in October. You'll be listening so hard your ears fall off.'

Her laugh is too loud for her small frame. Like bottles smashing into a recycling bin in the hour before dawn.

Wheelchairs have come a long way since the glorified wheelbarrows favoured by Roman men. After an orgiastic party - the kind where they'd lie on a padded chaise-longue and guzzle food from a central trough, stopping only to vomit, a slave would wheel them out into the night, obese, drunk and sexually glutted. Or so I imagine it, as I struggle with my returning-to-the-house routine: chair out of the car, body into chair, body and chair to front door, body and chair back to car to get shopping from boot, open front door, wish for a slave. In fact a dough-faced Polish girl called Lydia, from an agency, now comes in once a week to clean: she'll do the heavier shopping for me, too, and the washing. I can do all these things myself but it's too time-consuming. As my visit to the supermarket has just reminded me.

But through it all, up and down the aisles, I thought of Bethany. Odd, the way she has taken up residence in my brain as a permanent fixture - far more than any of the other kids I've been seeing regularly, even little Mesut Farouk, who made the striped hot-air balloon, or Lewis O'Malley, who cut off his own hand in a ritual act of self-punishment, or Jake Ball, who bankrupted his father by buying military hardware online by credit card: damaged babies, junior would-be Terminators who bring out the frustrated mother in me. 'Intuitive,' Dr Ehmet called her. I never look forward to our sessions but I want to get to the bottom of her. She's like a nagging crossword clue that I can't solve. One that wakes me in the night, sweating.

The evening is still so sun-scorched that the air above the pavement shimmers. I don't see the pale-eyed woman at first. She is standing across the road from my flat, her red hair oddly lustrous. Catching my eye, she raises her hand in a salute, like a secret agent using a gestural code we have both learned at spy-camp. I have mixed feelings about the mentally ill being cared for in the community.

The following morning, the radio news contains a story about a tornado in Aberdeen. It happened at six a.m. Five houses lost their roofs, and half a petrol station collapsed. There was no warning. I'd like to dismiss the fact that Bethany alluded to it. But somehow I can't.

Like many other successful doctors, Oxsmith's clinical director, Dr Sheldon-Gray, is a ferociously keen sportsman. His office, reached through a small antechamber where his PA Rochelle presides, is partly a gym, the broad desk sandwiched between two exercise machines, one for rowing and another for running. He is co-chairman of the regional Water Ski Association and won championships in his youth. I have learned this from my colleague Marion, who also informs me that the doctor's super-athlete weekends are spent with his family - a sport-supportive wife and three boys in their teens, who all don wetsuits and take turns to get towed across a lake at high speed at the end of a rope. I envy them of course. Perhaps I would like to be a member of their family, and experiment with disabled athletics. They told me in rehabilitation that nothing is physically unachievable if you want it enough: just read the memoir of the young rock-climber who crossed China on a hand-propelled bike after a devastating fall, or the American quadriplegic who plays a kind of wheelchair rugby called Murderball. Perhaps if I stay on the right side of Dr Sheldon-Gray he will invite me on his speedboat and I will acquire new skills. But perhaps not, once he learns that I have come to question him about Bethany Krall's incomplete dossier.

He has his back to me as I enter. I don't see him at first because it's a large room, and he's at the very far end by the windows, at floor level. I'm not expecting that. He is in a vest and shorts, rowing on his machine. The room has recently been painted in wipe-down buttermilk: you can still smell the faint, anodyne odour.

When I reach him I swivel my chair until our contraptions face each other, almost close enough for their metal to kiss. Or even mate and breed. My boss is veering muscularly back and forth, emitting small masculine stress-sounds like 'ungk' and 'gah', his arm-sinews pulled to the maximum. He's sweating like a rutting goat.

'I'd like to discuss Bethany Krall,' I say. 'There's nothing in the file by Joy McConey. If she made notes, they've gone missing.'

Apart from his fanaticism on the physical fitness front, Dr Sheldon-Gray possesses no obvious tics, and no apparent signs that he is one of the walking wounded of which my profession is largely comprised. Nevertheless the rowing machine's pace seems to slow at the mention of Bethany. I sense hers is not a name the director wishes to hear.

'Gah,' he puffs. 'Sorry, can't stop until I've done my quota, so if you just talk and bear with me. Ungk.'

'I'd like to see what Joy wrote.'

'Of course you would.'

'So may I?'

'No. Gah.'

'Can I ask why not?'

He makes me wait, listening to his intimate noises, until he has done another three strokes: his eye is on his heart-rate reading, and the digital clock.

'It would be - gah - unhelpful.'

'Unhelpful in what way?'

Abruptly, he stops rowing and starts rubbing at his face and neck with a towel. He looks across at me, still panting. Confidence gives a boom of volume to his voice, as though he's speaking to a crowd. He starts wiping down his arms.

'Well, she's officially on sick leave but there's more to it than that, I'm afraid. She began to show signs of mental unbalance. The notes reflect that. So I removed them from the file.' He flips his towel over his back in a decisive, alpha-male movement.

'I see,' I say as he fiddles with the little digital box on the rowing machine, trying to re-zero it. 'I'm sorry she's ill. I knew she was on a sabbatical, but no one told me the specifics.'

'Well, now you know them. So. Is that all?' he asks, when the digits are fully blanked. I don't reply. Instead, I wait. And wait some more. 'I mean, it's fair enough, don't you think?' he justifies finally. I say nothing. 'If you, Gabrielle, in a state of extreme personal distress, wrote a report on a patient that reflected badly on your professionalism, you wouldn't like it to remain on record, I imagine?' His eyes meet mine. Their astonishing clarity and blueness make them look artificial, like a pair you might pick out for yourself in a glass eye shop. Given my own shaky tenure here, I can't argue with the man. 'I'd stick to working out Bethany Krall for yourself, if I were you, Gabrielle. Are you settling in well, by the way?' Without waiting for a reply he starts rubbing down his strangely hairless legs, adding: 'We must get you involved in some local stuff. Plenty going on here socially. Big charity bash coming up at the Armada. It'll be a good opportunity for you to meet and mix. Though it's mostly science types,' he says with an air of apology.