The Rapture (9 page)

Then the knowledge slams in, and my heart misses a beat, leaving a time-vacuum in my chest. I say sharply: 'Oh Bethany, no.' I can't look at her because I know she'll be grinning. I think,
Bethany, don't do this.

The figure of Christ, now pictured in profile, sways and tilts forward.

Vertigo. Then a brief, yawning silence.

There are certain moments which you know you will recall for the rest of your life with perfect clarity. They are stamped with the blood's instructions: you will remember because you have no choice. There's a microsecond when the statue seems to do nothing, as if frozen in mid-decision, before it tips into its long and hallucinatingly beautiful death-dive, the white figure falling head-first in what starts as a slow lunge downwards as it disconnects from the plinth, then surrenders to the terrible grace of physics. I catch my breath. Its operatic scale is at once monstrous and riveting. The commentary has stopped. The only backdrop is a profound quiet. And then, with the stretched momentum of a fantasy or a lucid dream, the figure crashes into the mountainside, bouncing like a giant skittle and shattering into fragments as it goes: first one arm cracks and flies off, and then the other, then the torso itself snaps in two, the pieces tumbling at angles to drop into the thick smear of gas below, a mixture of smoke and oil and rain and cloud. A liquidised mirage of a place that might be Heaven and might be -

Watching it, and recognising it, I go hot and cold.

Bethany's sky-diver.

'Oh please no,' whispers a man's voice on the TV. 'No, no, no, no, no.' The silence broken, they all begin talking at once, shock-stimulated into a babble of disbelief, excitement and despair.

I belong to a generation that has seen statues and icons and buildings come tumbling down on TV: Lenin in Russia, the Berlin Wall, Saddam in Baghdad, the Twin Towers. But those topplings meant something to those who caused them. What does this mean? Who is to blame? What can one read into a random catastrophe, an out-of-the-blue event, an 'act of God'?

Nothing. In place of an explanation, however grotesque, there is a void.

Without a word to Bethany, because I am unable to speak, I swivel round and roll out at high speed, a ball of revulsion trapped in my throat.

That night, at home, I turn on the TV and they are showing it again, and again and again because they know from experience that we can never get our fill, that it cannot become real until every detail has been absorbed and digested and processed and re-imagined. And sure enough, the swell of chatter in the wake of Christ's epic fall has burgeoned into an international, interfaith Babel of opinion and emotion. There are weather experts, structural engineers, geophysicists, stonemasons, religious leaders, psychologists and even a conceptual artist dissecting the event. It's established that soapstone, from which the statue was made, is highly weather-resistant, and unlikely to give in to strong winds, even at massive accelerations. But an engineer argues that if the base had been hit by a heavy object - not impossible given the colossal amount of debris sucked into the sky - then the statue could have become dislodged, balancing only by force of its weight. 'Just look at where the statue stood: you can't get much more exposed than on a mountain-top. Winds at that speed, and at that height . . .' Another expert weighs in: it was not an accident waiting to happen, but 'a freak convergence of weather and structural physics'. The net is buzzing with conspiracy theories. Christ's fall was caused by a remotely triggered mini-bomb, part of a '9/11-style Jewish plot'. No, it was executed by Muslims on a hate mission. It was Iran's revenge. Clashing opinions and interpretations vie for dominance in an atmosphere of excitement tipping into mass panic. The statue was slammed into by a flying object. It wasn't struck by anything: it had merely eroded more than anyone realised. The Brazilian government knew this but covered it up. It was in extraordinarily good condition. No velocity of wind could wreak that damage on an object weighing a thousand tonnes. A toddler could have felled it with a single swipe.

Depressingly, the 'fall of the Redeemer' debate gathers momentum, obliterating the hurricane story. A radical Islamist cleric has claimed it's 'the judgment of Allah', which has set a predictable chain of events - outcry, counter-attack, death threats -in motion. Anti-Muslim rioting flares across the world, countered by anti-Christian demonstrations and the burning of crosses: a war of ideologies, sparked by a falling chunk of stone. There are arguments about the dangers of iconography, the dangers of religion, the dangers of literalism, the dangers of scaremongering. Again and again, along with millions, I watch the fall of Christ, mesmerised.

But slowly, as the hours pass, sanity creeps back and the statue's fall - which killed no one - is finally put in the context of the wider destruction the weather has caused. By the time Hurricane Stella concludes its two-day rampage, conservative estimates say that it has wiped out four thousand lives in Rio de Janeiro. The aerial images show hectare upon hectare of residential suburbs, of industrial estates and sprawling favelas laid waste, littered with slowly drying debris, corpses and rubble. The disaster relief agencies pour aid in, doing their utmost to prevent the spread of disease. But already, there are reports of typhoid. These are images I cannot bear. But I know that Bethany will be watching, chewing her green gum, soaking up the horror like a sunbather who can't catch enough rays.

When I eventually get through to Frazer Melville he assures me that Hurricane Stella hitting Rio on the date Bethany predicted is, to use the jargon, 'statistically insignificant'. Meteorology, he insists eloquently, is a notoriously inexact science, and much of it is simply guesswork. There are plenty of freak forecasts on the internet: Bethany could well have been trawling those. It's easy enough to be taken unawares - as many were with Stella. But it's just as easy to say you knew it was coming.

'It's like trying to second-guess a bucking bronco. Bethany got lucky, that's all.'

'If lucky's the word. But what about your phone call? You sounded excited.'

'Coincidences are exciting. So exciting I had to wake someone up at an ungodly hour. You were the obvious person. For which my apologies.'

'A thousand to one, you said,' I persist. 'Is that statistically insignificant too?'

He sounds unfazed. 'The good news is, I owe you dinner.'

Three evenings later Bethany's sky-diver drawing, which I have ripped down from the wall of the art studio, lies in a folder at my feet in La Brasserie des Arts. I hate to eat alone only marginally less than I hate to microwave ready-meals or order takeaways. But by now I know the staff at La Brasserie well enough to have a favourite table, and to be greeted personally by the manager. Who smiles at me encouragingly when he hears that tonight, for once, I will have company other than Psychiatry Today.

When Frazer Melville arrives he kisses me on both cheeks and apologises for being seven and a half minutes late.

'Remind me of the statistics of this not happening?'

'Me being late? Very low.' His joviality masks an edginess.

'The hurricane.'

'I said a thousand to one. But actually it was more like three.'

'So you owe me two more dinners.' While he fumbles his jacket off I pull out Bethany's drawing and place it on the table in front of him. 'Can you factor this into the calculations? She showed me this a week before the fall of the Rio Christ.'

I have written the date she drew it at the bottom of the page. I watch Frazer Melville absorb the image. The eye always travels left to right and top to bottom - the way Chinese hieroglyphs are drawn. He takes it in three times before speaking.

'Noteworthy,' he says finally. But offers no more.

'It makes me feel less sure that it's just coincidence,' I say. 'I mean, she would argue that she predicted this. And that she's foreseen other things too. There was an earthquake in Nepal she claims she told me about in advance.'

'And did she?'

'She may well have done. I was listening for other things. But when I saw the Rio Christ falling on TV, the connection to this image was obvious.' He says nothing. His eyes flit across the drawing again. We order our food and then there is another silence. Frazer Melville keeps glancing at Bethany's drawing propped against the salt cellar. I can see it's irking him.

'I'd like to look at her notebooks, if I may,' he says finally. 'Out of interest. Check what else she's seen in these so-called visions, and see if they correspond to anything.'

'Infringement of patients' rights: I'd lose my job.'

'If anyone found out,' he says matter-of-factly. 'But they don't need to.'

I feel a flash of anger. Does he really think it's that simple? Logistically, it would be easily managed, especially with a wheelchair which already conceals an illicit thunder egg and an even more illicit spray-can: he's right about that. But there's a moral issue.

'Are you familiar with a notion which we call human rights?'

'Would she mind?' he asks.

'She'd think it was Christmas. But I'm more curious about your reaction. On the one hand the scientist says it's just a coincidence - an
exciting
coincidence, and on the other -'

'The scientist would like to know if there have been any others. Nothing unusual in that.'

'How many would you need to see, before you stopped thinking they
were
coincidences? How many correct prophecies does this kid have to make before it goes beyond 'noteworthy'? One more? Two? I mean, if she did turn out to be right about Nepal -which I could check '

But Frazer Melville is shaking his head vehemently. 'From where I'm standing - from where any scientist is standing -the answer to that is, more than she can ever provide.'

'So why look?'

'Same reason I'm a scientist in the first place. Curiosity about the jigsaw. Seventy years ago no one believed the theory that a meteor was what wiped out the dinosaurs. Now it's established fact. New theories tend to gain ground slowly. Often because they're heavily resisted: they put careers at stake. There's a cynical saying in science. A professor's eminence is measured by how long he's held up progress in his field. Look how long some scientists hung on to the idea that the current global warming had nothing to do with human-generated carbon emissions. But argument and debate move science along. Doubt is essential. So is going out on a limb. You can't have an enquiring mind and be presented with a puzzle you know no one else has solved, without wanting to solve it.'

'But it's not just scientists. Look at the fall of Christ the Redeemer. All those people speculating that it's divine symbolism. Have you heard that the Pope's announced he's having a new statue made, twice as big, and guaranteed indestructible?'

We agree that the new religious turmoil is showing signs of becoming alarming. Then, as our food arrives, we move on to fundamentalism and atheism, then to the paranormal, and superstition, and the way religion is revered, or at least respected, in most cultures, while folkloric superstition is seen as dodgy, cheap, flimsy, medieval.

'I was taught by nuns,' I tell him. 'They couldn't see how tribalistic they were. Or how pagan. As for the traditions, it seems to me that the Catholic Church enjoys just making things up as it goes along. You could almost admire its creativity. And look at the Faith Wave. Overnight, intelligent design gets credence.'

'I like what Ralph Waldo Emerson said. The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next. My mum was a Protestant. She'd go to church on Sunday mornings, then get plastered in the afternoon. Towards the end she lost her faith. Just like that. Weird that she stopped praying, right when it might have helped her. She decided she'd wasted too many hours on her knees, for nothing. The vicar came to see her at the hospital and she wouldn't pray with him.' He smiles. 'She was stubborn, my mum. You know what her last words were? To hell with God, Reverend.'

We move on to the selfishness of genes, the phenomenon of altruism, and the categorical imperative. Which, with some twists and turns, leads us on to the Planetarians: I am instinctively more averse to them than Frazer Melville, who agrees with Harish Modak's viewpoint that the Anthropocene era - the reign of man - is hurtling to a close. 'Not least because no phase lasts for ever,' he points out. 'And why should it? People who know about rocks see Earth on a different timescale from the rest of us. To them, humans are just another species - a species that happens to be dominant for now but won't be in the future. Some people see Harish Modak as monumentally cynical, but in fact he's just stating the obvious. Geologists have been arguing this kind of thing for years. They're the boy who pointed out the Emperor was butt-naked. But no one listened before.'

'Child B's father's church believes in the Tribulation.'

'That's the seven years of Hell on Earth thing?'

'Yes. Before it kicks in, the good guys get whisked to Heaven in the Rapture.'

'That's the
deus ex machina
divine teleportation system?'

'Into the clouds and away. Leaving your clothes behind and a lot of baffled people.'

'First time I heard about it must've been back in the Bush era.'

'That's when it got properly into its stride. It fitted with the ethic. Heat the Earth till you usher in the Apocalypse, then get a private plane to airlift you to shelter, and screw the rest of us.'

'Well, sinners do need punishment, if you follow the logic.'

'And they need to reap what they've sown, and be assaulted by locust-plagues and earthquakes and what have you. The Faith Wave lot used to see climate change as an anti-oil conspiracy cooked up to boost the power of the UN. But that's evolved. The new thinking is it's a sign we're on the brink of doomsday. Which they're keen on, because it means they'll be raptured. Did you realise that in terms of numbers, there are more hard-core Christians today than in medieval times?'

'Does your kid go in for this stuff?'

'She was reared on it. But they found a burned Bible in the bin after she killed her mother.'