That summer, the summer all the rules began to change, June seemed to last for a thousand years. The temperatures were merciless: thirty-eight, thirty-nine, then forty in the shade. It was heat to die in, to go nuts in, or to spawn. Old folk collapsed, dogs were cooked alive in cars, lovers couldn’t keep their hands off each other. The sky pressed down like a furnace lid, shrinking the subsoil, cracking concrete, killing shrubs from the roots up. In the parched suburbs, ice-cream vans plinked their baby tunes into streets that sweated tar. Down at the harbour, the sea reflected the sun in tiny, barbaric mirrors. Asphyxiated, you longed for rain. It didn’t come.
But other things came, seemingly at random. The teenage killer, Bethany Krall, was one of them. If I didn’t know, back then, that turbulence obeys specific rules, I know it now.
During just about every one of those nights, I’d have dreams that were so vivid they felt digitally enhanced. Sometimes I could do more than just walk and run and jump. I could do cartwheels: I could practically fly. I’d be an acrobat, flinging my body across the empty air, then floating in the stratosphere like a Chagall maiden. Other times I’d find myself with Alex. He’d be throwing his head back to laugh, as if nothing had happened. Or we’d be having urgent sex, in a thrash of limbs. Or engaging in the other thing we’d so quickly become experts at: fighting. Viciously. Also as if nothing had happened.
Then I’d wake. I’d lie there, my upper body still sweating, the mail-order fan strafing the air across my naked skin, and let the new day infiltrate in stages. The last stage, before I rose to wash and dress and fight my tangled hair, like someone emerging from a date-rape drugging, would be the one in which I’d dutifully count my blessings. This folksy little ritual stayed brief, because the way I saw it, they didn’t add up to much.
When the skies finally broke, it felt biblical, megalomaniacal, as though orchestrated from on high by an irate Jehovah. On the coasts, cliffs subsided, tipping soil and rubble and silt on to the beaches, where they lodged in defiant heaps. Charcoal clouds erupted on the horizon and massed into precarious metropolises of air. Out at sea, beyond the grey stone bulwarks of the port, zigzags of lightning electrocuted the water, bringing poltergeist winds that sucked random objects up to whirl and dump. Passionate gusts punched at the sails of struggling boats and then headed inland, flattening corn, uprooting trees, smashing hop silos and storage barns, whisking up torn rubbish sacks that pirouetted in the sky like the ghostly spirits of retail folly. Maverick weather was becoming the norm across the globe: we’d all learned that by now, and we were already frustrated by its theatrical attention-seeking, the sheer woe of its extremes. Cause and effect. Get used to the way A leads to B. Get used to living in interesting times. Learn that nothing is random. Watch out for the tipping point. Look behind you: perhaps it’s been and gone.
Psychic revolution, worlds upended, interrogations of the status quo, the eternal proximity of Hell: subjects close to my heart at this point. Popular wisdom declares that it’s a mistake to make major changes in the wake of a catastrophic event in one’s personal life. That you should stay close to your loved ones—or in their absence, to those best placed and most willing to hold your hand through the horror-show of your new, reconfigured life. So why, in the aftermath of my accident, had I so obstinately done the opposite? I was so sure, when I made it, that my decision to quit London was the right one, arrived at after a cool mental listing of the pros and cons. But my Chagall-maiden dreams and the restlessness that infected me seemed evidence of another, less welcome possibility: that once again, I had banjaxed my own life — as thoroughly and as definitively as only a professional psychologist can. My brain, working overtime with denial, was a sick centrifuge operating at full tilt.
In the mornings, the modest skyline of Hadport fizzes gently with coastal fog which, pierced by the first light, can take on a metaphysical cast. There’s a spritz of bright air meeting water, of delicate chemical auras dancing around one another before mingling and ascending to the stratosphere. Conservative-minded angels, conscious of their celestial pension constraints and forced to relocate, might choose a town like this to spend their sunset years. So might my once energetic and cultured father, if he’d kept his marbles long enough to leaf through brochures about retirement complexes, instead of Alzheimering his way into a nursing home to spend his waking hours watching Cartoon Network and drooling into a plastic bib: as sorry an end for a former diplomat as can be imagined. If you venture out early enough you can taste the sharp tang of ozone in your mouth. Decent parking, my practical-minded, pre-la-la father would have said, if he’d accompanied me on my morning sorties along the gum-studded pavements of my new home town. Useful in your situation, Gabrielle. Later in the day, his high opinion might downgrade itself a notch. Hadport, being near the Channel Tunnel, has a high quota of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers: the bed-and-breakfast population, the shallow-rooted underclass about which the Courier opines on behalf of ‘heritage citizens’, who have graduated from compassion fatigue to a higher realm of pathological resentment which the paper’s editorials refer to as justified indignation. As the day rolls itself out, the litter bins fill and then erupt with Starbucks beakers, gossip magazines, buckled beer-cans, burger cartons gaping open like polystyrene clams: the husks of what nourishes the British soul. With dusk come mangy foxes, slinking out to scavenge in the drilling heat.
In my new life, I spend most weekdays two kilometres outside town, beyond a network of clogged arterial roads and mini-roundabouts. Skirt the brownfield site along East Road, past the Sleepeezee warehouse, the Souls Harbour Apostolic Church, the fuel cell plant, and a construction rumoured to be generating a pioneer high-rise pig farm, turn right by the giant pylon which, from a certain angle, appears to straddle, rodeo-like, the World of Leather, and you’ll spot a discreet signpost to my place of work.
Somebody should probably have taken a wrecker ball to it long ago. Built in the early twentieth century, the white mansion, seen through the electrified perimeter fence, resembles a decrepit cruise ship marooned amongst clusters of monkey puzzles, cypress and spiky palms: Edwardian, Gulf Stream trees. Once a hotel for convalescents prescribed sea air, its white-brick façade and scattered outbuildings are zigzagged with cracks like ancient marzipan. Wisteria and honeysuckle meander up wrought-iron balconies, trellises and gazebos blistered by rust. You might hope to find Sleeping Beauty in there, on display in a glass case, somewhere just beyond Reception. But instead, you’ll be entering a museum display of dados, cornices and ceiling roses, barnacled to peeling plasterwork. The building manufactures its own air, air that has not quite caught up with the scented-candle culture of modern times. Forest Glade room freshener predominates, struggling to mask deeper strata of Toilet Duck, dry rot, and the sad-sweet chemical smell of psychic suffering.
Welcome to Oxsmith Adolescent Secure Psychiatric Hospital, home to a hundred of the most dangerous children in the country.
Among them, Bethany Krall.
From my ground-floor office, you can see a row of white turbines in the distance, rooted in the sea like elegant food-mixers. I admire the grace of their engineering, their slim discretion. I have thought about painting them but the urge is too theoretical, too distanced from the part of me that still functions. I often stare out at the horizon, mesmerised by their smoothly industrious response to the wind. Sometimes, when I have a very specific form of cabin fever, I copy their movements, whirling my arms in rhythm — not to capture energy, but to release it. Glimpsing myself in a corner of the mirror, caught unawares, I’ll notice my hair, my eyes, my mouth, the intense tilt of my face, but I know better than to set any store by my looks, such as they are. They’ve done me no good.
When I first encounter Bethany Krall I am two weeks into what has been billed as a six-month posting, filling in for Joy McConey, a psychotherapist who has left the institution on a sabbatical that I assume to be a euphemism for some unspoken disgrace. None of my new colleagues seems keen to discuss her. There’s a high turnover in places that have a reputation for being human dustbins. Most of us are on flexible contracts. This is not a prestige appointment. There is talk of new cutbacks which could lead to Oxsmith closing for good. But raw from my enforced exclusion from what rehab called ‘the cut and thrust’, I can’t afford to be choosy about my employment. In the absence of a long-term plan, part of my persuasive argument to myself, in deciding to resettle, is that a short-term strategy in a strange place is better than none, in a familiar one.
Amid the broken staplers, the withered spider plant and the old styrofoam coffee cups of Joy McConey’s vacated office is a greetings card, the kind that’s ‘left blank for your personal message’. Inside, in small, frantic-looking handwriting, someone has stated, cryptically: ‘To Joy. Who truly believed.’ Truly believed in what? God? An end to the grief in Israel and Iran? An inmate’s psychotic fantasies? The signature is illegible. I am no great fan of spider plants. But something — my frail, inconsistent inner Buddha, perhaps — prevents me from taking life in a gratuitous fashion, even if it’s low in the food chain. Let the plant live. But don’t encourage the fucking thing. It seems that mould can grow on coffee despite a plastic lid. I pour the dregs on the pot’s asbestoid soil, and chuck the cup into the bin to join Joy’s card.
I am not a nice person.
I have gleaned this much from my fraught fellow-workers: I’ve been assigned Bethany Krall as one of my main cases because no one else wants to deal with her. As the newcomer, I have no choice in the matter. Bethany has been labelled intractable by everyone who has dealt with her so far, with the exception of Joy McConey, whose notes are not in the file — very possibly because she never wrote any. While I’m not nervous about having Bethany Krall on my list, I am not enthusiastic either. My perspective on physical violence has shifted since my accident. I now want to avoid it at all costs, and have taken every possible measure to do so, with the exception of having my strangulation-length hair cut short because I’m vain about it. But perhaps, with Bethany Krall on my list, I’ll be visiting the hairdresser after all: according to the case-notes, my new charge is something of an extremist in the aggression department.
After ten years of dealing with criminally psychotic minors I am used to stories like Bethany Krall’s, but the reports of her mother’s murder still manage to stir up a familiar, heart-sinking queasiness, a kind of moral ache. The full-colour police photos are shocking enough to make me blink, redirect my gaze out of the window, and wonder what kind of person decides to opt for a career in forensic pathology. Apart from the turbines in the distance, there isn’t much to comfort the eye. The shimmering tarmac of the deserted basketball court, a line of industrial-sized rubbish bins, and beyond the electrified perimeter fence, a vista that twangs a country-and-western chord of self-pity in me. For a brief moment, when I first arrived, I thought of putting a photo of Alex — Laughing Alpha Male at Roulette Wheel — next to my computer, alongside my family collection: Late Mother Squinting into Sun on Pebbled Beach, Brother Pierre with Post-Partum Wife and Male Twins, and Compos Mentis Father Fighting Daily Telegraph Crossword. But I stopped myself short. Why give myself a daily reminder of what I have in every other way laid to rest? Besides, there would be curiosity from colleagues, and my responses to their questions would seem either morbid or tasteless or brutal depending on the pitch and roll of my mood. Memories of my past existence, and the future that came with it, can start as benign, Vaselined nostalgia vignettes. But they’ll quickly ghost-train into malevolent noir shorts backlit by that great worst enemy of all victims of circumstance, hindsight. So for the sake of my own sanity, I apologise silently to Alex before burying him in the desk alongside my emergency bottle of Laphroaig and a little home-made flower-press given to me by a former patient who hanged himself with a clothes-line.
The happy drawer.
Before taking the lift up to the room christened, with creepy institutional earnestness, the Creativity Workshop, I go through the rest of Bethany Krall’s file, setting aside the more detailed notes of her drug regimen and physical check-ups to glance at later. The facts are stark enough. Two years ago, on April 5th, during the Easter school holidays, Bethany Krall stabbed her mother Karen to death with a screwdriver in a frenzied and unexplained attack. At fourteen, Bethany Krall was small and underweight for her age. Remarkable, then, that her mother’s savaging should have been so ferocious and sustained: the child had drawn huge strength from somewhere. But there was no question she had committed the murder: the house was locked from the inside and her fingerprints were all over the weapon. Bethany’s father Leonard, an evangelical preacher, was away at a prophecy conference in Birmingham at the time, having left that morning. He had spoken to his wife and daughter separately just an hour before the tragedy, and reported that Karen was concerned about Bethany’s loss of appetite, while Bethany herself had complained of severe headaches. Karen Krall had put the phone on the loudspeaker, and they had all prayed together. This was a family tradition.
At ten-thirty that evening a neighbour heard violent screaming and raised the alarm, but by the time the police arrived Karen Krall was dead. They found her daughter curled on the floor next to her in a foetal position. In this photograph, you don’t see Bethany’s face, but you see the part of her mother’s that isn’t blood-covered. The screwdriver is rammed deep into her left eye, its yellow plastic handle protruding. It has an odd jauntiness, like a dinner-fork stuck upright in a joint of meat cooked rare, and abandoned mid-meal. The pool of blood on the floor has developed the kind of skin that acrylic or emulsion paint will form. Another photograph, taken from above, shows an open waste bin containing, according to the notes, ‘the charred remains of one King James Bible’. A physical examination immediately after the tragedy showed recent bruising on Bethany’s body, particularly the upper arms, and damage to both wrists. From this it was concluded that a severe physical struggle had taken place.
On the next page is a happier portrait of the Kralls, taken a year before the family imploded. It shows a dark-haired, sharp-faced child, and on either side of her, the parents: a good-looking father and his pale, more meagre wife. They are all smiling widely — so widely, in Bethany’s case, that the braces on her teeth take centre stage. Unhappiness takes many forms, I reflect. But happiness, or the semblance of it, can be as limited and unhelpful as the word ‘cheese’. Bethany’s teachers described her as highly intelligent but disturbed. Reading between the lines I suspect that like so many kids of her generation, she is a classic product of the last decade’s ‘interesting times’, of its food shortages and mass riots and apocalyptically expanded Middle East war, and in her case, more specifically, of the Faith Wave that followed the global economic crash: preacher’s strong-headed teenage daughter, who questioned the dominant role of fundamentalist Christianity in her life and rebelled. At school she was self-destructive, and had very possibly had sexual relationships with boys, but she paid attention in class, showing a particular aptitude for science, art and geography. There were no obvious signs of mental illness, though at the end of that spring term, in a staff meeting, concern was expressed that she seemed ‘more unhappy than usual’.
I flick through to the next section, which is the attending police psychiatrist’s report. Dr Waxman’s write-up is verbose, but the story it tells is straightforward enough. In the immediate wake of the murder, Bethany’s coping mechanism was as brutal and efficient as a field amputation in time of war: she lost her memory. She did not deny committing the crime, but claimed to have no recollection of it, or what had provoked her to such drastic action. Nor would she speak to her father, when he returned, distraught, from his trip to Birmingham. Her refusal led to distressing scenes. ‘Elective amnesia as a form of denial, or refuge, is not uncommon among those who have experienced trauma,’ notes Waxman. ‘This can be just as applicable to the perpetrator of a crime as to its victim.’ On committing her to the care of Oxsmith, Waxman pronounced himself hopeful that she would make progress within the next few weeks and months, and moved on to his next case.
But Waxman’s optimism about the beneficial effects of Ox-smith Adolescent Secure Psychiatric Hospital was misplaced. Two years into her institutionalisation, Bethany Krall had made four attempts on her own life and seriously attacked another patient. Her memory had returned, but she refused to speak about the murder or what triggered it. She began to starve herself and, after being diagnosed with acute depression, was given a panoply of mood-altering drugs, none of which proved effective in improving her morale. Bethany showed no interest in co-operating in therapy sessions, and remained largely mute. When she spoke, it was to express the belief that her heart was shrinking, her blood was poisoned, and she was ‘rotting from the inside’. Increasingly experimental drug combinations were applied, some of which made her state of mind worse, and led to side-effects such as trembling, dribbling, lethargy and, in one instance, convulsions. She exhibited extreme disturbance, cutting herself frequently, and becoming dangerously underweight.
One day, in the wake of a severe thunderstorm during which she mutilated her throat with a plastic fork, Bethany insisted that she was dead, and that her body was slowly putrefying. To prove that as a corpse she was unable to digest food, she stopped eating altogether. At this point, Cotard’s syndrome — a nihilistic conviction that one’s body has expired — was aired as a diagnosis, and after some discussions, it was agreed that she should undergo electroconvulsive therapy as a last-ditch resort.
The results are described as ‘dramatic’. Bethany began to eat, talk and respond more positively to therapy. Although she experienced some of the usual after-effects of ECT such as short-term memory loss and disorientation in the immediate wake of each session, the psychiatrists judged the treatment to be an unmitigated success. Bethany herself said she felt ‘more alive’, and insisted she experienced the ECT interventions as positive — despite the fact that she was anaesthetised throughout and could have no recollection of them. But weirdness is relative in the territory occupied by the mentally deranged. Anything can manifest itself and, with the skewed anti-logic of anxiety dreams, it does: tins of mango slices containing encoded messages from the Office for National Statistics, a conviction that your skeleton will dissolve if you think about sex, a grouting phobia. A junior arsonist I dealt with once, who could cite the chemical compound of every flammable gas known to man, insisted on keeping his mouth open to avoid getting lockjaw. He’d sleep with a wedge of pillow clamped between his teeth as though his life depended on it. Life’s rich tapestry, Dad would have said, in his bridge-and-crossword days, before Cartoon Network and the drool-bib took over the show.
Since March, after an initial five weeks of weekly sessions, Bethany’s shock therapy has been administered on average once a month, as a maintenance dose, by one Dr Ehmet, whom I have not yet met, though I once caught sight of the back of his head and noted that he could do with a haircut. But effective though the ECT has been, Bethany’s refusal to discuss her parents and the catastrophic event that brought her here continues. What prompted her to attack and murder her mother with a screwdriver one April evening remains a mystery. Therapeutically, I am not sure how much this matters. Psychological principle has it that buried traumas must be exhumed and dealt with before a patient can move on. But I am less and less convinced by this reasoning. If there was a pill that could suppress horror, I would take it myself, and wipe out the last two years of my life. The brain is as uncharted and unfathomable as the sea, and as capricious. But it is also wise enough to do what’s required to keep a body going. Who says that for Bethany Krall, forensically analysing what she did to her mother, and why, will do any good? Sensing this on some level, might she be using the ECT as a means of obliterating a crucial section of autobiographical memory?
Aware of the time, I skim quickly through the rest, which includes a further note, added by Oxsmith’s principal psychiatrist, Dr Sheldon-Gray, at a later date. The patient’s father, Leonard Krall, has declined to see Bethany in Oxsmith. Therapeutically speaking, this may be to Bethany’s advantage, as his explanation for his wife’s murder is that Bethany was ‘possessed by evil’.
I too have a problem with words like evil. When my mother died, my father sent me to a Catholic girls’ boarding school, a place of unshakeable Bible certainties — certainties to which a man like Krall, and the millions like him who converted during the Faith Wave, can be no stranger. Living by such certainties, he knows that the only explanation for Bethany’s violence is nothing earthly, such as pain or revenge or anger or simply a chemical imbalance in the brain, but a ‘visit’ from a notion. True faith, the kind of faith that is described as ‘burning’, carries its own aura. A sort of righteous chutzpah. You see them on their mass marches, their faces illuminated from deep within. That conviction, that passion, that energy: you can envy it.
When I arrive in the studio for my meeting with Bethany a thickset male nurse is already there, talking on his mobile, deep in an elaborate technical discussion about shift schedules. I’ve heard that Rafik is tough and alert — but his with-you-in-a-minute gesture doesn’t inspire confidence. Despite having spent much of the last few months devising and practising new physical defence strategies involving the grabbing and twisting of vulnerable body parts and the strategic hurling of objects, I feel permanently vulnerable, a moving target. The notes have just told me that in December last year, Bethany Krall bit the ear off a boy who sexually attacked her. She chewed it up so badly it couldn’t be reattached.
Marvellous. Bring her on.
Then suddenly — far too suddenly — a huge escorting nurse with tattooed arms has done just that. The door has opened and a dark streak of a girl has walked right up to me. And already she’s too close. You never get used to everyone being taller than you, to seeing them from the wrong angle. She should step back a bit. But she doesn’t. Rafik exchanges grunts with his mountainous colleague, who nods at me as if to say package delivered, and leaves. I could shift again, but I don’t want to risk it. She’d know what it meant.
Bethany Krall is small, bird-boned and underdeveloped for a sixteen-year-old. On her head, a tangled mass of dark hair like a child’s angry scribble. Self-harm being an ever-popular hobby among the female patients at Oxsmith, her bare arms reveal the usual welter of cigarette burns and crosswise slashes, some old, some more recent.
‘Hallelujah. The new psychiatrist.’ Her voice is babyish for her age but oddly hoarse, as though someone has scrubbed the inside of her throat with a chemical abrasive.
‘Good to meet you, Bethany,’ I say, manoeuvring myself to offer a handshake. ‘I’m actually a therapist rather than a doctor.’
‘Same shit, different asshole,’ she declares, not taking my hand. Like me, she’s wearing black: the garb of mourning. Does she still believe, on some level, that she has died?
‘Gabrielle Fox. I’m new here, I’ve taken over from Joy McConey.’
‘I always start by giving you guys the benefit of the doubt. That means ten stars out of ten to begin with,’ she says, assessing my wheelchair. ‘But you get an extra one for being a spaz. Positive discrimination, yeah? So you’re starting with eleven.’ The notes mentioned she was articulate but I’m still surprised. You come across it so little in this kind of place.
‘Ten’s fine, Bethany. In fact, very generous of you. I specialise in art therapy. Subscribing to the theory that art’s a good way of expressing feelings when words fail.’
Her eyes are dark, feline, heavily outlined in kohl. Sallow, olive skin, a narrow, asymmetrical face: she’s what you’d call striking rather than pretty. Or jailbait. Her hair looks matted beyond redemption. She seems a far cry from the girl in the family photo. Has she spent the last two years soaking up the institution’s own brand of teen culture, or is this attitude intrinsic? In either case, she behaves like she’s up for a fight, and she looks like trouble, and she sounds like trouble — but then most of them do, one way or another. Preliminary assessment: she’s more intelligent and more verbal than most, but otherwise, so far, so normal.
‘The bottom line is, I’m here to help you, and encourage you to express whatever you want to express here in the—’ I am unable to say Creativity Workshop: it gets stuck in my throat. ‘Here in this studio. Whatever it is. No limits. It’s an exploration. Sometimes it can take you to dark places. But I’m on your side.’
‘A spaz who patronises me. Great. Great to have you on my side in dark places. Psychobabbling away.’
‘I’m just someone to talk to. Or if you don’t want to talk, I’m here to supply you with paper and art materials. Not everything works in words. No matter how big your vocabulary.’
She waggles two fingers at her opened mouth to indicate disgust. ‘You’re down to five. I can see you don’t belong here.’ She looks at me levelly. ‘So perhaps you should just wheel yourself off into the sunset in that spazmobile of yours. Before something bad happens.’ She circles the chair, then stops behind me, and leans down to whisper in my ear. ‘So you’ve taken over from Joy. Tragic Joy. I guess you’ve heard all about the distressing way she left?’ Her knowing use of cliche. strikes me as a possible clue to her inner clockwork. She speaks as though her life is an object held at a distance, a source of amusement — a fiction rather than a reality. ‘I warned her about what would happen. I warned her.’
I’m snared by this, as she intends, but I know better than to show an interest in my predecessor, so I gesture at the walls. ‘Is any of this work here yours?’
There is a game you can play: match the artwork to the wacko. But having spent time — more time than I ever intended — in casinos, amongst roulette wheels and backgammon tables and stacked chips, I know that it’s too much like poker, another pastime it’s wise not to indulge in.
‘Yeah, Joy was tragic but you’re tragic too, I guess,’ she continues, ignoring my question. ‘I mean, you bother with make-up, when no one’s going to take a second look, are they, no matter how hot you are, right? Unless they’re some sort of perv. No offence. But hey, Spaz. Reality check.’
If you show them an abusive word has got to you, they know they’ve won. And then they can do anything. And they will. ‘I asked if you’d done any of the work here,’ I say lightly. ‘And you can call me Gabrielle.’
‘You mean these great masterpieces?’
She glances around with disdain. The artwork features the usual range of motifs: flowers, anarchic fuck-the-system graffiti, graveyards, jungle animals, bulging breasts and engorged phalluses. But there are some oddities too. One of the kids, a skinny twelve-year-old boy who helped his father murder his sister in the name of family honour, has been constructing a huge papier michi. hot-air balloon, striped blue and white, which hangs from the ceiling above us like a big light bulb. It is an enterprising, ambitious, hopeful and joyous balloon, a balloon that is more whole in spirit than the boy who made it. It’s both consoling and intriguing, that art can do that. Look at a pickled brain, and you’ll see a putty-grey bolus, lumpy and naked as an exposed mollusc. But there’s space inside for a thousand worlds, none of which need be remotely compatible.
‘Perhaps it’s time to try making something in here,’ I suggest. ‘Is that something we could schedule in for you?’
It’s as though I haven’t spoken. I ride out the silence for a while, but then realise she’s playing a waiting game too. The fixity of her expression — contempt as a default mode — indicates that her mind’s lodged somewhere she considers safe. I catch Rafik’s eye and he looks at me with what might be sympathy, or even pity. He’s well-liked here. He’d be called ‘a rough diamond’ or perhaps even ‘a devoted family man’ in news reports of his violent death at the hands of a psychotic patient. I wonder how many Bethany Krall sessions he has sat through.
‘Bethany?’ I prompt eventually. ‘Any thoughts?’
With a sudden movement she perches herself on the central table and lets out a theatrical sigh.
‘First I get my ECT. Then Tragic Joy. And now you. So my thoughts are that Oxsmith is treating me like a fucking princess. You’re down to one star, missis.’ Turning to the inbuilt wall-mirror, she inspects her teeth, still caged in the same silver braces as in the family photo. ‘Hey. See anything interesting in there, Uncle Rafik?’ she asks, noticing his eye on her. ‘Fancy a high-risk blow-job?’ He turns away, and she cackles in triumph.
‘If you don’t feel like doing any artwork we can just sit together and watch movies if that’s what you want,’ I persevere.
‘Porn? Extra star for saying yes.’
‘Sure,’ I say, noting how quickly sex has entered the conversation. ‘Anything for a star on the Bethany Krall Competence Scale. If they have any porn in the DVD library. I haven’t investigated. How do you feel about watching hardcore sex?’
She laughs. ‘You’re babbling again. You people are so fucking predictable.’
She is right of course. If Bethany is disturbed minor number three hundred for me, I am probably therapist number thirty for her. She knows the tricks of the trade, its let’s-coax-it-out ploys, its carefully framed ‘open’ questions and neat follow-ups, its awareness of key words and phrases, a set of formulae I’ve been increasingly inclined to abandon since my accident. It’s clear that with a case like Bethany, the normal rules do not apply. I can see that at this rate, we’ll soon be going off-road. Gonzo therapy. What’s to lose? But for now, I stick to the well-worn track.
‘The art group meets here three times a week for sessions. But some people prefer working alone. I’d guess you might be one of them. I’ve got watercolour equipment, acrylics, inks, clay, or you can do computer imaging, photography, that sort of thing. My only rule is, no home-made tattoos.’
‘And if I don’t want to do any of that shit? Including date-stamping myself by decorating my tits with snakes?’
‘The content of our sessions is up to you. We could just talk. Or go for a walk.’
Her face sparks up meanly. ‘Go for a walk, like how?’ Her voice is cross-hatched with elaborate scorn. Exhausting, to maintain those levels of anger and yet have no specific target. How tired she must be.
‘In the grounds.’ Just us and five male nurses with shaved heads who pump iron.
A smile is quirking the corners of her mouth. ‘Yes, you would need some physical protection. With my record of violence? Which you’ve just read about in my file? I’ve read about it too. And seen the pictures. Gory stuff. Hey, I’d be afraid of me.’
I wait a beat. But she’s used to that: no dice. ‘Are there ways you are afraid of you, Bethany? Having looked at those pictures?’
Her mother’s desecrated face barges into my mind like a crude shout.
‘You must feel, like, totally naked in that wheelchair. I mean, someone could just tip you out of it. You’d be like a beetle stuck upside down.’ She contemplates the image for a moment. My heart-rate has gone up and I’m aware of blinking more than I should. Sweat pricks in my armpits. She has pinpointed a fear, and she knows it. ‘But I’m interested in this walking thing. I mean, how would it work? Seeing as you seem to be, excuse me for pointing it out, but totally fucking disabled, lower-limb wise? Do I push you in that thing?’
‘No need. I wheel myself. You learn a lot in spaz rehab,’ I say, defusing the word and tweaking a tiny smile out of her. I’ve had this chair eighteen months, and my hands have transmogrified into tools, accessories of meat and bone, the skin of the heel calloused despite the gloves. ‘So how would you feel about a fresh-air session?’
‘How would I feel about it?’ she repeats slowly. I immediately regret my choice of phrase. ‘How would that make you feel, Bethany? Bethany, in terms of feelings, what’s going on at the moment, inside? That’s the bottom line for you, right? Look at you. Babble babble babble. You’re fucking tragic. I can’t believe they let you work here. Don’t they vet you guys? Filter out the lame ones? Whoops — no pun intended. But zero out of ten. And you’ve got there in record time. I appoint you babble champion of Oxsmith! ’
I gaze out at the slowly spinning turbines.
No: I should not be here. And Bethany Krall has swiftly spotted it.
In rehab, they lectured you on the importance of establishing a healthy routine. Hadport Lido opens at seven. In the mornings, I’ll often spend an hour there, hoisting myself into the shallow end and doing twenty tepid laps amid the drowned insects. I have come to know the staff there by name: Goran, Chloe, Vishnu, tanned and healthy and sparkle-eyed. They’ll say hi, and I’ll say hi back. To them, I am the nice lady they feel sorry for, and admire for her ‘courage’ — as if she has any choice in the matter. I overheard them once, evoking the pathos of the nice lady’s plight, noting her attractiveness, and speculating about her age. The consensus was that the nice lady was ‘late twenties’ — a flattering assessment for a 35-year-old. The nice lady, who is not really a nice lady at all, swam on. Her arm muscles, already well honed by the wheelchair, have developed into features to die for. Want them? she feels like asking whenever she receives compliments from well-meaning people, the kind of people who drive her even more insane than she already is. I’ll swap them for your legs.
Swimming is both good and bad for rage. It can help to dissipate it, but it can also focus and refine it. I was told back in London that if I wanted to work at a senior level again, I’d need to deal with my ‘issues’. That, said my employers, would involve more intensive therapy, plus a written self-assessment and analysis. My reaction, when they told me this in the meeting — a warm afternoon, the sun just sinking behind the old Battersea Power Station — was what we in the business call ‘inappropriate’.
‘You’re talking to a trained psychologist, for fuck’s sake!’ I said.
Or did I shriek?
Yes, I must admit I shrieked. Shrieking is both deeply feminine and deeply unfeminine at the same time. When women imitate pressure cookers, they show their worst selves, the side that men call either ‘passionate’ or ‘mad’, depending on whether or not good looks are involved.
‘Don’t patronise me with lectures about coming to terms with the new reality: I live with it every day! I am the new reality!’
Nor is shrieking a good way to communicate in a psychiatric establishment, if you are not an inmate, and indeed, if you have been until now classified among the sane, and in charge of others less fortunate.
‘Gabrielle, I have enormous sympathy and respect for you, and you have been through what no person should go through. With all your… terrible losses. But you work in the field,’ said Dr Sulieman when the members of the committee had trooped out, exchanging distressed glances. ‘See it from an employer’s point of view.’
If my legs worked, I’d have kicked him. Violent urges came to me very readily back then.
The ‘negative attitude’ I had towards my diminished status as a human being after my accident was unfortunately a ‘significant problem’. As Sulieman spoke, I inspected the print on the wall behind him, the image he had chosen as his own personalised backdrop: Monet’s lily pond, with its hypnotic plays of light, its strangely hot greens and blues. ‘A problem which, until it’s resolved, means we are unable to accept you back as a therapist at the present time.’ He’s into the classics, so where’s Kandinsky? I wondered. Where’s Egon Schiele? Where’s van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, where’s Rothko, where’s The Scream?
I’d just spent an hour with my physiotherapist, learning how to hit people where it hurt. A karate chop to the balls. A squirt of vinegar in the eyes. A flung object, aimed at the head. Cripple power. A flicker of pity from my boss, and that expensive Venetian paperweight on his desk — a whirling rhapsody of trapped bubbles and squirls — would make contact with his skull.
‘I need to work, Omar. If you can’t take me back, then find me somewhere else.’
‘That’s not the best thing for you, Gabrielle. Or the people you’re helping.’
‘Look at this chair. I’m welded to it for ever. I’ll probably never have another relationship. Or children. Call me melodramatic, but the fact is, every night I lie in bed and hear the clang of doors closing on my future. So if I can’t do the thing I know how to do, and still can do, the thing you helped train me in, the thing I’m good at by all accounts, how can I even be me? If you can answer that question for me, bravo. Because I can’t. If I can’t work, I’m done for.’
When a job came up at Oxsmith, he recommended me. Then, three months later, I heard that he was dead. Good people drop like flies, I thought. And I never thanked him the way I should have.
Water under the bridge.
In the art studio, Rafik’s pager has registered the arrival of a text which he now seems intent on answering. Meanwhile Bethany has switched tack. ‘I suppose you could be something the drugs do,’ she’s saying dreamily. ‘Something in my head. That happens. I’ve still got a load of psychotropic toxins in my bloodstream, they’ll never leave my body. Like saccharine. Did you know that saccharine just builds up for ever in your system?’ The notion that I might be a hallucination doesn’t seem alarming to her. In this moment, it quite appeals to me too. ‘So what do I call my new saviour? Spaz? Saint Gabrielle?’
‘Gabrielle’s fine.’
She thinks for a moment. ‘Wheels.’
‘I’d prefer Gabrielle,’ I say, swivelling again to assess her profile. She closes her eyes. A moment passes.
‘You’re quite a fish, aren’t you?’ she says, her eyes opening again in unexpected delight. Dark, like night-pools. ‘Quite a mermaid. Always in the water! Up and down you go! You like getting out of that chair, don’t you? It’s like being freed from your cage!’ She beams, as if she has solved a puzzle in record time.
As I try to fathom this, I don’t reply. But then it occurs to me she can probably simply smell the chlorine. ‘If I touched your hand I’d know even more,’ she says. The delight has gone, replaced by amused menace. ‘I didn’t even have to touch Joy McConey to know things. I saw what she had coming.’ If she’s asking permission, I am not giving it. I’ll shake hands on the first meeting but apart from that I don’t do physical contact. ‘I register stuff. But half the time it doesn’t mean jack shit to me. It’s, like, way over my head.’
‘Can you tell me more about this "stuff" you register?’
She smiles. ‘Seas burning. Sheets of fire. Whole coasts washed away. The glaciers melting like butter in a microwave. You know Greenland? Basically dissolved. Like a great big aspirin that says Hazard Warning on it. Empty towns full of human bones, with lizards and coyotes in charge. And trees everywhere, and sharks and crocodiles in the underground. The lost city of Atlantis.’ Are these drug-induced visions? Daydreams? Or is it metaphorical?
‘It sounds like a dangerous world you’re describing. Dangerous and chaotic and life-threatening. A lot of people worry about catastrophic climate change. It’s not an irrational fear.’
The latest projections predict the loss of the Arctic ice cap and a global temperature rise of up to six degrees within Bethany’s lifetime, if nothing is done now. I should be grateful to be childless. Just as the Cold War figures heavily in the fantasies of the elderly mental patients, climate-apocalypse paranoia is common among the young. Zeitgeist stuff: the banality of abnormality. Its roots in facts so appalling we turn the other way politely. I’d like to steer Bethany towards the subject of suicide, my main concern, on paper at least, because if she dies on my watch, there will be administrative issues that won’t look good on my first post-accident job. What is the likelihood of a repeat performance? Apart from the four attempts, according to the notes she is a regular self-harmer. They also label her well-informed, manipulative and prone to dramatic mood-swings, as well as psychotic fantasies, biblical outpourings and sudden, extreme violence. Again, unwillingly, I conjure the police photographs. Forty-eight stab-wounds. The screwdriver in Karen Krall’s eye. The film of skin forming on the blood like antique sealing-wax. The photographer’s flash stamped in it for ever, like a fossil star.
‘It is a dangerous world. And we’re in it. There’s no escape, Wheels.’ She gives a small mirthless laugh. ‘All of those people out there. Decent hard-working folks who ain’t never done no one no harm,’ she says, putting on a cartoonish yokel voice. ‘Dying a horrible death. All of us dying a horrible death.’ This notion seems to cheer, rather than frighten her. Suddenly there’s an electric energy about her. I sense an immense reservoir of violence and anger, a latent force that I find as compelling as it is alarming. I must watch out of my own perversity. ‘Have you heard of the Rapture?’
‘Vaguely.’ I know of it as an element of the Faith Wave creed brought over by the British citizens who abandoned their sunshine homes in Florida and returned to the UK after the global crash. Its popularity was expanded by celebrity conversions and a swathe of addictive, redemption-themed TV shows. ‘Tell me about it.’
‘It’s salvation for the righteous. When the shit hits the fan, the true Christians go straight to Heaven in, like, a big airlift. The rest get left behind. Mercy for the pure in heart, justice for the rest. It’s all in the Bible. Look at Ezekiel, look at Daniel, look at The Daniel, look at Revelation. All the signs are there. Iran, Jerusalem. Things are going to blow any day. Seven years of tribulation. Coming soon to a planet near you. The heat of Hell. The survivors, they’ll be trapped in it. It’s starting now, you can feel it. Plagues and pestilences and God’s wrath and the reign of the Antichrist. Who shall plant the mark of the Beast upon them.’
There is a sick logic to the Faith Wave phenomenon, I reflect: in the face of more Islamic terror attacks, why not pit one insane dogma against another? Every week, there are mass baptisms, True Story gatherings, Commitment marches.
‘Do you have faith, Bethany?’
‘Faith?’ She snorts. ‘That’s a good one. Would I be here if there was a God? I don’t think so! But I have the mark of the Beast, look.’ She plants a forefinger on each temple. ‘Invisible in my case. That’s where the electrodes go.’
‘What did God mean to you, growing up?’
‘He never meant me any good. The thing I never get is, who created God? No one can ever answer that one. It’s like the universe. It’s ever-expanding, right? But what’s outside it?’
‘God never meant you any good in what way?’ She shrugs, and looks away. Either she doesn’t know, or she is withholding. I wait a moment but when I see I’ll get nothing I try another tack. ‘What was it like being a child in your family, Bethany?’ She shrugs. ‘You can quote the Bible. So I’m wondering what sort of influences you had.’
‘Are you? Well wonder on.’
She looks edgy. ‘We believe in the universal sinfulness of all men since the Fall, rendering man subject to God’s wrath and condemnation.’
‘Who’s we?’
‘Them.’
‘Your parents?’
‘Hey, she’s hot! How many degrees has she got up her ass?’
‘So tell me what else you’re thinking about.’
She perks up, splaying her hands in front of her and flexing them as if to test their competence as grabbing tools. Her nails are as filthy as animal claws. One scratch, and she’d infect you. ‘Half the planet drowns, I can tell you that. Islands sinking, coasts getting eaten up by the sea. The land getting smaller. Water sloshing all over it in these giant tsunamis, the temperature zinging up. The stuff on the way, that’s just part of it. I’ve seen it in the Quiet Room. Earth looks like a gobstopper. You can zoom in. Satellite vision, Wheels. You hear what I’m saying?’ She is nodding so hard that her whole body begins to rock with the movement. She can’t seem to agree with herself enough. ‘Yeah. I have fucking satellite vision. Like the Hubble telescope.’
The Quiet Room is a nondescript chamber on the second floor of Virgil Block, where they administer a muscle relaxant, a general anaesthetic and then electroshock therapy to inmates who have not responded to other treatments. The thought of a sixteen-year-old enjoying it makes me feel queasy.
‘It’s not just weather that’s causing it. Weather’s just like a side-product,’ she’s telling me, still rocking, a fleck of spit gathering at the corner of her mouth. I try to quell my distaste for this girl, and for the unimaginativeness of her cataclysmic visions — visions already shared by half the population, along with a belief in miracles and tarot readings, if the polls are anything to go by. ‘It’s the kind of thing that could land you in a desert of chemical crystals. Or leave you stranded somewhere in a wheelchair.’ She raises her eyebrows at me meaningfully. ‘On a black rock with dead trees. It’s not just heat, it’s geological activity, worse than the worst earthquake.’ She is alert, flushed, vivid. The stock diagnostic phrase ‘a danger to herself and others’ slides through my mind. The cynicism has given way to manic excitement. ‘Cracking, not where the tectonic plates meet but in other places, new places.’ The words are tumbling out in a rush, making the fleck of spit pulse. ‘Belching out these unbreathable toxic gases. You know why it’s so hot at the Earth’s core? Because this planet’s just a chunk of some supernova that exploded, like, aeons ago.’
I wonder what channels she had been watching. Discovery, BBC World, Cartoon Network, News 24, CNN. But where? When? The TV in the rec room seems permanently fixed on MTV. The internet. A million websites, a zillion images — you can go anywhere, believe in anything, see carnage of every variety, scare yourself to Neptune and back. If global warming is terminal proof that we have fouled our own nest, Bethany is evidence that some human minds can draw energy from the fact.
‘You know what I mean by the Earth’s core,’ she says, touching her heart with spread fingers. Her father is a preacher: I wonder how much of her presentation comes, unconsciously, from him. Or perhaps it’s just an ability to convey conviction that she has picked up, a charisma. ‘I mean its centre. I mean its soul. I saw it when they zapped me. You’re not supposed to remember anything about the shock, right? But I do. My whole body wakes up. I came back from the dead, you know. Like Lazarus. Or Jesus Christ. I can see things, Wheels. Disasters. I’ve made notes. Dates, times, places, everything. Just like a weathergirl. They should employ me. I’d get paid a fucking fortune. I can see stuff happening before it happens. I feel it. Atoms popping about. Vibrations in your blood. These huge fucking wounds. The planet in meltdown. This freezing stuff, pouring from the cracks. Then it heats up, like some kind of magma. And whoosh. The promised land.’
She smiles, bright-eyed, and for a tiny, fleeting fraction of time, she looks ecstatically, murderously happy.
Unimaginably atrocious things have surely been done to Bethany, to make her do what she did: things that can never be undone. And she has done an unimaginably atrocious thing in return. I doubt I will ever get to the bottom of the trauma that led her to take a Phillips screwdriver to her mother, though I might take a second look at the photo of the father and hazard a guess that some of the damage came from him too. What matters now is Bethany ‘moving forward’, as the jargon goes, on a shiny conveyor belt of psychic progress. People like me are supposed to believe in repair, and I once did, until I became the object of my own clinical trial. After which—
Not any more. Damage limitation, perhaps. Sometimes. Sometimes not. When you stop being a woman, as I did on May 14th two years ago, there are things you see more clearly. Sexuality confounds matters, insinuating itself into every exchange. Freed of all that, you can see things for what they are, like kids do, and old people. That’s my theory. But it’s only a theory. And anyway, who says I am free?
‘So you see, with all that going on in my head, it’s like non-stop around here. Things to think about, things to do, that’s me,’ finishes Bethany. But after the rush of information, the burst of energy, she seems suddenly deflated, dissatisfied with herself. Her fantasies are a fertile oasis in the desert of her boredom, and a corner of her consciousness knows it.
‘Things in the self-destruction department.’
‘Things in the self-destruction department.’ She mimics me well enough to make me wince internally. ‘Bibble babble, bibble babble, bibble babble.’
I let my eyes wander around the room until I catch sight of myself in the mirror, and make a swift, stranger’s appraisal: a woman with extravagant brunette hair, who may be skilled at her work, and good-looking in a seriously-damaged-goods sort of way, but who is clearly forever dependent on others. Who will never walk again, never have sex, never give birth. Who shall remain forever beholden to others.
Bethany has stopped rocking and is looking at me intently. I don’t say anything, but an instinct makes me assess the distance between us. And the angles. When my father moved into the care home five years ago, my brother Pierre came over from Quebec and together we cleared out his bungalow. One of the souvenirs I took with me was a freak of geology known as a thunder egg which Maman kept on her dressing table: a perfect, fist-sized sphere of flint which passed down her family, along with the eccentric story that if someone sat on it for long enough, it would hatch. Maman was much attached to the thunder egg, and now I am much attached to it too, though not for the same romantic reasons. In addition to the regulation personal alarm all staff carry, and in defiance of the hospital’s strict regulations, I keep the stone ball in a hanging pouch under my seat, in case of emergencies, along with my miniature spray-can of photographic glue — also illicit — which I’ve been reliably told is as effective as mace. But if I can’t react fast enough, and Bethany reaches for a sharpened pencil and stabs me, how long will it be before Rafik — still busy — intervenes and activates his alarm? Trapped as I am, I’d be a lot quicker to kill than Mrs K.
Almost as though she has read my thoughts, with a swift movement — too sudden for me to react — Bethany has reached out and grabbed my wrist with her small, surprisingly muscled hand. Her skin is clammy, her grip too tight.
‘Let go of me, Bethany.’ I take care to say it quietly and levelly, to hide the inner scream. Rafik has jumped to intervene but I signal to him that I will deal with this for now. Still gripping my wrist, Bethany turns my hand over so that the palm is facing upwards, and puts her finger on the pulse. I feel it begin to race under the pad of her skin. ‘Let my hand go, please, Bethany.’
But she is somewhere else. Her face has a mesmerised look. ‘So someone died,’ she says, in her baby voice. ‘Someone died a horrible death.’ My breath catches roughly in my throat. ‘There’s no point telling me he didn’t,’ she continues excitedly. ‘Cos, fuck! I can feel it in your blood!’ She narrows her eyes. ‘I died once, so I know. I recognise the symptoms. Death leaves a mark. Did you know that blood has its own memory? It’s like rock, and water, and air.’ I look down at my pinioned wrist. I know my arms are stronger than hers. But when I start to pull away, she tightens her grip and I think with an inner lurch: perhaps they’re not.
With a practised movement, Rafik has swiftly grabbed her other arm. ‘Easy, Bethany. Let go of Miss Fox now.’ Smoothly, he pulls off the cap of his belt-alarm.
‘And you never got to know him properly, did you?’ Bethany is whispering. A flashing light in the corridor outside indicates the emergency call has worked. They’ll be here in seconds. Again I try to pull away, and fail. Rafik has a firm hold of her shoulders now but she’s gripped a handle of my wheelchair and barnacled herself to it. The fingers of her other hand, which Rafik is trying to prise away, now tighten further on my wrist, pressing deep into the pulse. ‘It wasn’t fair, was it? It was just the beginning of a beautiful relationship!’
‘Off her now!’ mutters Rafik, tugging so fiercely at Bethany’s arm that my wheelchair threatens to capsize. I try not to scream, try not to think, an upturned beetle.
‘Yeah, a beautiful relationship, right? The best ever!’ Bethany’s head is next to mine now and she’s whispering in my ear. I watch the lights flashing outside and listen for footsteps running. I don’t hear any. ‘But you never found out how the two of you would be together. That’s your problem. You got emptied out. You had two hearts and one was gone. Hey. That sucks. The poor tragic cripple!’
Finally, Rafik has pulled Bethany off the chair, released my wrist and forced both her hands behind her back. Roughly, he shoves her against the wall and struggles to keep her in position while waiting for backup.
I reach my hand under lily seat and flex my fingers round lily thunder egg while the pressure swells in my head. For a few seconds I am too disoriented to speak. I look out of the window. The turbines spin their slow rotations on the horizon, far out at sea. My heart hurts. No, it aches. So someone died a horrible death… You never got to know him properly. Two hearts and one was gone. Then the rage comes in, a big ugly slub of it. She has hurt me, seen things and said things she shouldn’t have, and more than anything I want to damage her. Badly. I palm the stone and consider its decisive heft. It’s aching to be thrown. Then I realise that if I don’t get away from her right now, I’ll do it. Or try to. And miss, of course, and fall out of the chair in a ridiculous lunge. And then it will be me who Rafik is restraining, and I’ll lose my job.
At last the door bursts open and six psychiatric nurses pour in: four men and two women, all built like tanks. They swarm on to her and pin her to the floor while Rafik stands back, rubbing his wrist in pain.
‘Little bitch bit me,’ he mutters, wiping at the blood.
‘I think we’ll call it a day now, Bethany,’ I breathe, trying to make sure the sob that’s hatching in my throat doesn’t make it to the surface. ‘I’ll see you next time.’
She seems to find this, or something else, unaccountably funny. In any case as I leave the room she laughs and laughs, like the horrible, crazy little girl she is.
Suppression is easily done. It’s a simple matter of choice. My decision to forget what Bethany said — about things she can’t possibly know — is a judgment call. I’m fully aware of what I am doing. In the time it takes to hurtle up the corridor to the lift, I have flung the moment from my mind and from my life, like toxic waste down a chute.
My new home is minimalist. Things like nice cushions once mattered to me. Cushions that match your sofa, and perhaps also your curtains, cushions that end up on the floor when you and a certain poker player are doing the deed, with abandon, in front of a winter fire. But since my world got recalibrated overnight, I’ve stopped caring about interior decoration, and my only cushion-related concern is the quality of the gel pad I sit on to prevent pressure sores. Domestically speaking, my issues are ramps and wheel-in showers and worktops at the right level, and how to apply to the council to get further innovations installed at no cost. Thanks to someone else’s misfortune, I have managed to acquire, at short notice, a self-contained ground-floor flat in Hadport that is already wheelchair-adapted. I’m aware that this represents a kind of jackpot in the disability world, and feel duly grateful. I feel other, less comfortable things too. The previous occupant, a young tetraplegic called Mikey, succumbed, suddenly, to ‘complications’. His family’s loss has become my gain. The flat was advertised by the owner, Mrs Zarnac, on a spinal injury website. I’m not superstitious. But I’ve made a point of not enquiring further about Mikey’s complications, or asking in which room he died, or how many hours passed before his carer found him.
It’s a ground-floor flat in the old part of Hadport. I don’t see much of Mrs Zarnac, who lives upstairs. Lonely-looking older men visit her, and when she cooks for them, vinegar smells waft down. It crosses my mind she might be pickling them alive, one after another, for some dark embalming project. In a spirit of defiance and also as a perverse comfort, I have acquired a Frida Kahlo print which leans against one wall because I can’t reach to hang it up. Autorretrato con Collar de Espinas: Self-Portrait with Necklace of Thorns. Against a backdrop of jungle leaves, Kahlo gazes blankly out from beneath the single eyebrow which, for aesthetically unfathomable reasons, she refused to pluck into a conventional twosome. It’s a head-and-shoulders portrait, so you don’t see her wheelchair. At her left shoulder is a black cat, eyes wild, ears cocked back, positioning itself to pounce on a dead hummingbird which hangs, wings outstretched, from a mesh of thorns around her neck. In Mexican folklore, the bird is meant to bring good luck or love. To her right, preoccupied with something in his hands, is her pet monkey, a present from her pathologically unfaithful husband, Diego. The same folklore says this creature is a symbol of the Devil. Two dragonflies and two butterflies dance above her head. I assume they represent the imagination, and the freedom it offers. Often I’ll lie on my bed, trying to psychoanalyse the passionate and deranged Frida, forced to turn herself into a shrine to pain. She painted her own complex torture again and again, obsessively, in different guises, many macabre: the artist hooked to machinery, pierced by nails, surrounded by foetuses in jars, trussed into a surgical corset, as an antlered deer stuck through with arrows. She’s an appalling role model. I am a Petri dish of nascent manias, many no doubt as poisonous as those that swarmed in Kahlo’s head. The notion that medical technology will evolve, and I’ll walk again in some state-of-the-art, semi-bionic way: I’ll spend hours finessing that one.
But the fact is there are still times when I just want to die.
I have another Kahlo reproduction, which hangs in my hallway: Cuando te tengo a ti Vida, Cuanto te Quiera. Its title means, When I Have You, Life, How Much I Love You. This being too schmaltzy a sentiment to articulate aloud in English, even to myself (my inner cynic balks), I nevertheless find myself rolling the Spanish words around my mouth and finding them, with the distance of foreignness, a comfort. Cuando te tengo a ti vida, cuanto te quiera. Watching TV puts your own hell in a different perspective, if that’s what you want. Today I do.
I make coffee, with which I permit myself four squares of dark chocolate, transfer to the sofa, flick through the movies on offer, hesitate between a documentary about famine and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, and end up plumping for the news. Two more suicide bombings in Jerusalem. Abductions, limbs lost, children orphaned. Black-clad women wailing their grief in Iran. The row about Chinese and American greenhouse gas emissions has ratcheted up a notch, while the heatwave has spread to the whole of Europe, felling old people in precise strokes, like an efficient industry. The morgues are, in the reporter’s phrase, ‘bursting at the seams’. Spain, France and Italy are the worst affected.
Or the lucky ones, according to a spokesman for one of the Planetarian-inspired eco-groups that sprouted after the Copenhagen climate summit failed to deliver. After he retired and spent more time with his periodicals, my father developed a habit of referring to our era as ‘the Age of Dogma’. He used the growth of the Planetarian movement to prove his point: he saw it like the Faith Wave, as another example of how like the weather, the moral debate and its proponents had become more extreme, self-righteous and fanatical. Then his brain turned to Emmental and I heard no more from him on the subject. Which was a shame because he would have had interesting things to say about its more recent manifestations. ‘These are natural, organic losses,’ the spokesman says reassuringly. Although he’s a radical, he talks in pastel, like the kind of low-key but efficient salesman who, when selling you a product, makes sure to tell you that he owns one himself, and that he is more than satisfied with it. ‘Human culls are not a new phenomenon,’ he says. ‘Desperately sad though it is for the families of those elderly people affected, I think there are positive aspects to these deaths, which we have a responsibility to assess.’
‘Would you also like to see a zero birth-rate, to follow that argument to its logical conclusion? As advocated by thinkers like Harish Modak?’ asks the interviewer. I have heard of Modak, seen his photo: a strong-faced, elderly Indian with hooded eyes. His name crops up constantly in eco-debates and he has inspired a thousand survivalist settlements worldwide. A prophet of doom, is the general consensus in the British tabloid press: a fun-killer, an eco-bogeyman.
‘Of course. As would any rational person who’d like to help ensure minimal human suffering in decades to come. You’ll find there’s a groundswell of opinion. The times are changing and we’re changing with them. Adapting. As we’ve always done. But personally I’m prepared to take the argument further than Harish Modak does, much as I admire him. Look at the financial resources being pumped into combating diseases like Aids and malaria, when logic tells us that epidemics are simply Gaia’s very efficient way of keeping populations down. And if that’s the case, when we intervene to combat organic illnesses, all we’re doing is encouraging population growth, and therefore exacerbating the—’
I flick off the TV. Only two years ago, when I was in rehab, people like this man, with his talk of positive shrinkage, were seen as marginal eccentrics at best, and at worst, eco-fascists and eugenicists — a source of relief to those of us who found themselves at the top of their waste-of-carbon lists. But now, within a few months, what began as a movement conducted on the blogo-sphere has found its way into the mainstream. I have seen enough neglected and damaged kids to have strong opinions about people’s ‘right’ to have children. But disease is another matter.
Diseases like malaria. Diseases that foreigners get.
Inhaling minimally, and pondering the interesting evolution of the word ‘organic’, I manoeuvre myself off the sofa and into my chair. A singleton weekend looms and I must find ways to fill it.
In my new life as a queen of tragedy I have a classical lightweight wheelchair that folds into the car, which this afternoon I am using to trundle along the pedestrian area of Hadport, with its tiny boutiques selling candles and wind-chimes and horoscope jewellery and over-packaged soap, then into the shabbier side-streets of kebab outlets and newsagents, then past the cinema, the sports centre, the bird-spattered statue of Margaret Thatcher, and the elderly, pony-tailed New Ager selling fluffy worm-puppets on long strings. Today there’s an outdoor market with fresh fish and ripe fruit on display: the smell of mackerel and cheeses and sugar-toasted peanuts mingles with the salt ocean air and the tang of warmed seaweed. After the downpour and the gales, the sun is back, a relentless fireball. The heat is abrasive, a hair-dryer with no off switch. Surfaces glitter in the shimmering air. Everyone is wearing sunglasses. I can’t think of the last time I saw anyone’s eyes in daylight. Or the last time I bared mine.
I head for a café. I have discovered, whose three crucial attributes I regularly celebrate: disabled bathroom facilities, a view of the waterfront, and good coffee. Here I settle at a corner table near the window and read Bethany Krall’s medical report, the first part of which is written by Dr Ehmet, listing the various drugs she has been administered over the months, before Cotard’s syndrome and electroconvulsive therapy entered the equation. Antipsychotics and antidepressants, plus drugs to counteract the side-effects: Prozac, Cipramil, Lustral, Risperdal, Zyprexa, Trazodone, Effexor, Zoloft, Tegretol. The next part is written by Hamish Bates, a therapist who worked with Bethany for two months before leaving for the private sector. According to him the ECT ‘gave her relief from the delusion of being dead, but stimulated a preoccupation with climate change, chemical pollution, weather patterns, geological disturbances, and apocalyptic scenarios’. He is interested in Bethany’s frequent references to the Rapture, ‘a notion that is heavily debated in the Faith Wave’s Armageddon discussions, along with the belief that the Messiah will return after a seven-year period of "Tribulation" or "End Times", in which God will punish humankind for its sins, by means of plagues, floods, fire and brimstone, etc. With the spread of war in the Middle East and the fear of biological weaponry further exposing the cultural nerve, it is no surprise that a notion such as the Rapture has seen a resurgence.’ Having done his Googling and recycled some five-year-old Guardian op-eds, Hamish Bates allows himself to wax philosophical in his final paragraph, speculating that Bethany’s recurring themes are ‘classic metaphors for the turmoil of the mind, prompted by the geological disasters and meteorological vagaries of our times: clusters of catastrophes that cry out to fit into a pattern, be it accelerated global heating or divine retribution for man’s sins’.
I may question Bates’s originality, but I agree with his assessment. Bethany’s pain is planet-shaped and planet-sized: she has her own vividly imagined earthquakes and hurricanes, her own volcanic eruptions, her own changing atmosphere, her own form of meltdown.
The pool is swarming with kids at weekends, so I spend the rest of the day and Sunday at home with the fan on, surfing the net for information on electroconvulsive therapy and state-of-the-art wheelchairs which I can’t afford. My curiosity on those matters satisfied, I move on to a subject which has been at the back of my mind since the TV debate on human cull caused by the heatwave. The Planetarian movement’s spiritual leader — though he publicly distances himself from its wilder outpourings — is the Calcutta-born, Paris-based Harish Modak, a geologist and one-time colleague of the late James Lovelock, who came up with the notion of Gaia, the planet as a self-regulating organism with its own ‘geophysiology’. I skim Modak’s latest article, which appeared recently in the Washington Post. There is ‘colossal arrogance’, he maintains, in the assumption that humans will last for ever. If we look at the planet’s life across billions of years, rather than in terms of humankind’s meagre history as a dominant species, we will see that our presence on Earth has lasted the blink of an eye. ‘We are the agents of our own destruction — and when we are gone, extinguished by our own heedless quest for expansion, the planet will not mourn us. Indeed, it will have cause to rejoice. Today, the human species stands at the brink of a new mass extinction which will see if not its disappearance, then its extreme marginalisation.’ Modak cites climate model projections which back this up starkly, and reproduces the famous table which demonstrates how, if the planet is allowed to heat up by three further degrees, positive feedbacks will force it up to four, then five, then six. ‘The Chinese curse "may you live in interesting times" has descended on those of us living in the twenty-first century as never before,’ Modak concludes. I rather like his grandiloquence. He’d probably object to anyone saying it, but his sentiments have a biblical as well as a Hindu ring to them. ‘For the first time in human history, the destruction — already apparent — is global. In times past, children and grandchildren were seen as a blessing, a sign of faith in the future of the gene-pool. Now, it would seem that the kindest thing to do for our grandchildren is to refrain from generating them.’
Although more conservative and measured than the Planetarian on the TV, Modak’s underlying message seems to be that pessimism is the new realism. I do not doubt his projections or his figures or his graphs. But his conclusions depress me.
Once a year Hadport is home to the national British chess championships. Chess players are notorious for both their terrible dress sense and their lack of orientation skills. It was a week ago that I first caught sight of the carrot-haired woman — in her forties, badly dressed, dishevelled — opposite my flat. At first I assumed she was one of their strange tribe, stranded in Hadport after her lost chess match like a misplaced evacuee. She looked off kilter. But then I had other thoughts, prompted by the fact that she was empty-handed. Every woman — whether or not she plays chess — carries a bag. Her lack of this standard accessory made me think that perhaps she was local after all: local enough to be a neighbour who has popped out on a rare bag-free errand. Or mad. A bagless woman can look, and feel, almost obscenely naked. Dewombed. In a world increasingly full of distressed people, every small town has its aimless oddballs, men and women who drift in and out like flotsam.
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.
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.
‘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.’
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.
But people mean well. Flashing her a smile, I execute a fast wheelie and cross the room swiftly. A wheelchair can part crowds like the Red Sea. The white-tuxedo’d Dr Sheldon-Gray is with his wife Jennifer, who I recognise from the photo in his office, which flatters her because it doesn’t show her porky bottom or her visible panty-line. Will I ever get used to the way I am forced to assess crotches whether I wish to or not?
‘Is there a guest-list?’ I ask bluntly.
‘In Reception, I think,’ offers Jennifer. Clearly relieved I have found a project, Sheldon-Gray smiles, winks in a generalised way, and excuses himself: he and Jen are off to work the room. I part the seas again.
The guest-list is attached to a noticeboard on the wall just out of my reach. This feels dangerously like the final straw. After a few attempts at grabbing it I’m about to give up and go home when a large, tall man emerges from the mC1i.e of the hall wiping his face with a napkin. Spotting my predicament he strides over, rips the list down and presents it to me with a comedy flourish.
‘Thank you.’
‘Are you looking for someone on there?’ he asks. His accent is Scottish.
He is big and slightly overweight, with a soft-featured, pleasant, if unassuming face and an interesting oddity in his left eye — a splotch of green in the hazel-brown of the iris. ‘Not really. I’m just interested to see who’s here.’
‘Well,’ he says, pointing at a name. ‘Members of the great-andthe-good club mostly. But there I am. A non-member.’ Dr Frazer Melville, Department of Physics. ‘Pleased to meet you.’ He thrusts out a hand to shake. ‘And you?’
‘Gabrielle Fox,’ I tell him. His hand is warm and a little sweaty.
‘I’m a therapist at Oxsmith.’
Dr Frazer Melville — who I pray is not going to be a weirdo — is studying my face sidelong with forensic interest. ‘Shall we re-enter the fray?’ He gestures at an empty table just inside the hall, near the shelter of a large pot-plant. When we have made our way to it, he pulls up a chair and sits himself opposite me. ‘So you’re a Londoner.’
‘You can tell just by looking?’ I ask.
‘Yes. As it happens.’
‘Are you some new breed of urban anthropologist?’
‘No, but I’m a Scot, and one fish out of water can spot another.’
‘It’s not London that does that. It’s the chair.’ It comes out more grumpily than I intend. ‘But if you’re a physicist, maybe I could pick your brains about something. I have a patient who has a kind of climate-and-geology obsession.’
The big Scot smiles. I like the splotch of green in his eye. It’s like a tropical fish darted in and set up home. And his teeth. I like Dr Frazer Melville’s teeth, too, which are white and even and not too small for his face. This matters to me. He is probably — though this is totally irrelevant — about forty.
‘Sure. But I’ll be honest with you. I’m not planningto stay here long. I hate these functions, and I hate wearing this ridiculous costume. There’s an Indian restaurant across the road that won’t poison us.’
Immediately, the prospect of rejecting a chaotic buffet scrum in favour of a quiet curry has distinct appeal. In addition, Frazer Melville’s accent entertains me enough to make me want to hear more of it, and I like his attitude to the charity event.
‘But if you’d rather stay here with the thoughtfully assembled, er, amuse-gueules…’
I shake my head as a pesto confection glides past on a tray. ‘My turn to be honest. I can guarantee you that this thing I’m wearing is even more uncomfortable than your outfit, if we’re having a competition. I’m hitting seven out of ten on the pain scale here.’
‘Well, it may not be comfortable, but it’s flattering,’ he says, openly surveying my cleavage. ‘You’re a joy to behold, if I may say so.’ Oh well. I have put it on display, so it would be hypocritical to complain, I suppose. But I am on shaky ground.
‘My friend sent it. She’s a fashion buyer,’ I say quickly, feeling a radical blush spreading upwards from the flesh in question and blooming on my face like a Rorschach test.
‘What you need is food, Gabrielle Fox. I can see you’re hungry. May I?’
When he manoeuvres me out through the frenzy of the kitchen, I feel like a baby in a buggy kidnapped by its eccentric uncle.
Outside, I take charge of the chair again. The heat from the kitchen is still burning on my skin in the warm air. The blush hasn’t quite died down either. As we approach a zebra crossing side by side, I wonder whether I should tell him it’s my birthday. No: he’d offer to pay for the meal, and I can’t allow that. I stay on the pavement but Frazer Melville steps out jauntily, forcing two cars to brake hard. With a burst of inappropriate amusement, I realise that I am in the company of a man who might well turn out to be as dangerous as he is energetic.
Delhi Dreams, aromatic and low-lit, with flock wallpaper and red furnishings, is a classic British Indian with d6cor untouched since the 1970s. Ensconced at a quiet corner table, the physicist is telling me that he moved to Hadport from Inverness six months ago, having obtained a grant to continue his research at Hadport University. His background is pure and applied physics. He tells me that his current branch of study, fluid dynamics, covers a wide spectrum but, in the case of his PhD, involves the kinetics, pressure and flow of ocean currents. ‘But then I wanted to broaden things out, so I studied meteorology and started investigating air turbulence. Trying to discover why molecules move the way they do. Did you know that flocks of birds and shoals of fish and swarms of insects follow similar kinetic rules? It seems random but there’s a logic to it. There are lots of new theories around at the moment. None of which I can explain without drawing mathematical equations on a napkin and boring the pants off you. So tell me about this patient of yours.’
Wait! Me first! It’s my birthday! I want to blurt. But even if I could find an unchildish way of telling him it would still sound abrupt, incongruous and borderline tragic. He’d wonder why I’m not somewhere else, with friends. Which would set me wondering, too, and reaching dismaying conclusions. We order poppa-dums and a comfortingly aggressive house red, and I tell him about Bethany — who, in a last-minute nod to professional confidentiality, I refer to as ‘Child B’. I tell him about Child B’s Faith Wave background, Child B’s nihilistic delusion of being dead, followed by her breakthough with ECT, her intelligence, her intractability, her militant cynicism, her artwork. I can’t have spoken at length to anyone for a long time, because it’s like someone has unplugged a cork. I wonder if I sound a little obsessed with Child B — but if I am, it’s still a relief to discuss her with someone who isn’t in the business and will never meet her. ‘It’s like she’s always playing some kind of game with you. She’s unsettling. She claims to have the power to predict natural catastrophes.’
‘Meteorological or geological?’
‘Both. Just the other day she said, there was going to be a tornado in Scotland. And sure enough, there was.’
‘The one in Aberdeen?’
‘I have to admit I found it unsettling.’
He smiles. ‘You shouldn’t have because it’s emphatically a coincidence. Small tornadoes happen far more often than anyone realises. We get a lot in this country. Case dismissed. Go on.’
‘And she can sense things in people’s blood too, or so she claims. Blood and water and rock.’
‘They have more in common than you’d think,’ says Frazer Melville, tearing off his tie and shoving it in his pocket. The poppadums arrive and he attacks them with verve. ‘Why not make a note of what she says? Or better still, get her to write it down.’
‘She already does. She has notebooks full of drawings. But I don’t press her on the detail. It’s best neither to confirm nor deny a patient’s fantasy.’
‘That’s policy?’ This also seems to amuse the physicist. ‘You have a fantasy policy at Oxsmith?’
‘In a way. And not just at Oxsmith.’
‘But what if it isn’t fantasy?’
‘The paranoids really are out to get me? Istanbul really is about to be destroyed by a massive earthquake?’
He pauses mid-bite. ‘It’s on a faultline. So it’s a real possibility. Quite well-known.’
‘And there’s going to be a massive hurricane hitting Rio de Janeiro next week? On the twenty-ninth? She gets very specific. And it all seems to be Armageddon-related, one way or another.’
‘Para-catastrophology.’ He pulls out reading glasses to survey the menu we’ve just been handed by the waiter. Not forty, then, I think. A bit older. ‘A whole new field. Could put experts like me out of a job. There was a bloke in the States, in Vermont, called the Weather Wizard, he’s dead now. His real name was Louis D. Rubin. He looked at the clouds and predicted days when there’d be unusual weather. He was mostly right.’
‘So she might be right about this hurricane, for example? By picking up signs the rest of us can’t see? Because that’s what she’d claim.’
‘I’d doubt it. It’s still the hurricane season, and they’re getting bigger every year because of the increased air temperatures. But super-hurricanes are a complex phenomenon. With global warming, we’re seeing all sorts of things we haven’t seen before. That’s the trouble with trying to model anything on a computer: we only have the parameters of what’s already known. But Rio de Janeiro — highly unlikely, I’d say. It’s south Atlantic, and typically they’re in the north. The first on record was in 2002. Took a lot of us by surprise. But it may have marked the start of a trend.’
‘So what are the chances that she’s right?’
At this his eyes change shape and you can almost see his brain turn into a calculator. ‘Off the cuff? A thousand to one.’ He smiles suddenly. ‘I’d be happy to bet our next dinner on it.’ He takes a big bite of poppadum and crunches noisily.
I can’t help smiling too. I can’t be used to it, because it makes the muscles around my mouth ache. Is it possible that I am enjoying this evening after all? I agree to the bet, but insist that this dinner’s on me, because it’s my birthday. There. I have said it. Delighted, he orders champagne, for which he insists he’ll pay. Surprisingly, Delhi Dreams has some, and even more surprisingly, it comes close to being adequately cold. If he thinks it odd that I have nothing better to do on my birthday than have dinner with a physicist I met at a function to which I had to scrounge an invitation from my well-connected boss, he doesn’t mention it: he says it’s an honour, and he raises his glass in a complex toast which pays tribute to my ‘fabulous dress and its contents’, to Child B, and to the vagaries of high and low pressure uniting us ‘at this auspicious moment of twenty-first-century history’.
Frazer Melville, who is forty-four, who lost his mother to cancer only two months ago, and who is divorced from a Greek geologist called Melina, eats in the same way he orders. He is eager, greedy, unselfconscious, and sure of his own taste. Melina couldn’t have children, he tells me. But that’s not why the marriage failed. It was more complex. ‘And quite humiliating for me,’ he confesses. ‘Knocked me right back.’ I nod and wait for him to go on. ‘Irreconcilable differences just about covers it. It was tough, but we’re on amicable terms now that she’s back in Athens. Our interests overlap, so we run across one another’s work from time to time. Exchange the occasional e-mail about marine landslides and whatnot.’
‘Did you ever make fireworks when you were a boy?’ I ask him.
‘Only the basic liquid kind with Diet Coke and menthols. I wasn’t a sophisticated pyromaniac. I melted gallons of wax over bonfires and made a million tangerines explode. A normal childhood for someone who ended up as me. OK, my turn. Gabrielle as a kid. Hmm. You were a mini version of what you are now. You were sharp, and very proud of that amazing hair, even though you knew you shouldn’t be. You knew how to empathise but it got you into trouble sometimes. But you weren’t so angry back then. Or so beautiful.’
The problem with blushes is that once they’ve started, there’s no preventing them from running their course. The champagne is going down well. Giddy after two glasses, I start telling jokes, culminating in the one about the faith healer. I barely recognise myself.
Later, back home, I wonder if I am still able to like people. It isn’t something I’ve properly tested. I let him push my chair when we went through the hotel kitchen — and not just because I wanted to protect my dress from being splattered with sauce by some maniac sous-chef. In the delicate etiquette of wheelchair use, I permitted an intimacy.
A few nights later I am having one of my vertebra dreams. I am operating on my own lower back, fixing the damage with pliers and a monkey wrench. ‘There,’ I tell the nurses and medical students who are watching. They are in a semicircle. ‘If I can do it, you can.’ I point to the diagram of the spine, the one they first showed me when they explained my injuries. It looks like a bonsai tree. An alarm bell goes off. It is a warning. I must finish the operation because they need the pliers back. And the monkey wrench.
It’s actually the phone.
There is light coming through the blinds, but it feels like the middle of the night. I check my alarm clock. It’s seven a.m. The phone is cordless and I have left it on the table by the door, too far to reach in any hurry. So I do not pick up — partly because I suspect it is Lily, who I know from our conversation a few days ago is gearing up to one of her love crises. Vertebra dreams always throw me. I am having trouble getting my mind in order. My head hurts. I had three glasses of wine last night. Alone. Lesson number one of paraplegia: alcohol is bad for you. After six rings, the answerphone kicks in.
‘Sorry to ring so early, Gabrielle,’ he says. ‘You’re probably fast asleep. Dreaming of new ways to—’
‘New ways to what?’ I ask, picking up. Funny how a paralysed woman can shift her butt quite quickly when she wants to.
‘New ways to intrigue men from Inverness. But listen here. This is going to sound odd but I have to ask you. That south Atlantic hurricane your psychotic case talked about. Child B.’ He sounds excited, a bit reckless. ‘Can you remember when she said it would hit Rio?’
‘The twenty-ninth.’
There’s a grunt on the other end of the line and then a fumbling sound: my Scottish physicist friend is apparently getting dressed, one-handedly, as we speak. I can hear Radio Four on in the background.
‘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.
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.
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.’
‘She killed her mother? Christ. You didn’t tell me that bit.’ He looks uneasy. ‘Are you surrounded by murderers in that place?’
I shrug. ‘I don’t think of them that way. They’re just disturbed. And it’s my job. Anyway, what I’m getting at is that Child B had — has — religion issues. To put it mildly. The fall of the Rio Christ was to her what 9/11 was to all the anti-Western Muslims we saw dancing for joy that day. And not just because she claims to have predicted it. If her father visited, I’d have a lot of questions for him.’
‘You can hardly blame him for keeping clear, if she killed his wife.’
‘Things are always more complex than they look,’ I say. ‘I’m wondering about the healthiness of his role in her life. And her mother’s.’ We consider this for a moment and then I point my fork at him. ‘Eschatology.’
‘Greek. The doctrine of last things.’
‘Correct. If you’re an eschatologist, and you believe the Apocalypse is about to happen, you’re happy. You’re going to be saved. But as a sinner, how would you spend your last moments on the Earth as we know it?’
‘I’d do exactly what I’m doing now,’ he says, amused. ‘Eat spaghetti alle vongole in enjoyable and combative and extremely attractive company. No, scrub that. I’d take the said company to its natural psychic habitat, which is probably Paris because I’m guessing you’re partly French, with a name like Gabrielle.’
‘French-Canadian.’
‘OK then, Montreal. Which doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. But we’d order ourselves a gastronomic extravaganza in a Michelin-starred restaurant, and finish it with industrial doses of Belgian chocolate.’
Something about the physicist doesn’t add up. ‘Are you flirting with me?’
‘Well, if I am, you started it. You invited it. Yes maybe I am. In a safe kind of way.’
I flare. ‘Right. So being paralysed from the ninth vertebra down makes me a safe kind of girl? Thanks for the compliment.’
‘I didn’t mean that. I meant… I’m flirting in a non-threatening kind of way.’
‘The way gay men do?’ A wild guess.
Interestingly, the physicist looks thoughtful rather than outraged. ‘How do gay men flirt?’
‘They talk a lot and they give compliments but they never follow through on the physical side. Is that what you meant by unthreatening?’
‘I read somewhere that thirty per cent of people have had at least one homosexual experience, and I must say I was quite surprised the figure was that low. But the trouble is, in my case, I was always far too attached to the mammary gland.’
‘I noticed.’
‘So you are a mind-reader.’
I laugh. ‘No, I’ve got a pair of eyes, though, and I’m a normal woman. Or I used to be.’ I stop, appalled that I’ve just said it aloud. It isn’t funny. What am I doing, discussing my breasts with a physicist, when nothing works below the bellybutton?
‘The fact is, I’ve been quite, er, reserved on that front since my marriage broke up,’ confesses the physicist.
I nod. ‘How long were you together?’
‘Four years. But we were apart for a lot of that time. Melina would do these long field trips, and then I’d go off to China or somewhere. By the time it ended, we exchanged e-mails more than we spoke. But there were other factors. Well. There was one other factor.’
‘An irreconcilable difference?’
He reddens and studies his spaghetti with intense interest. Then he looks up and smiles. ‘It turned out I wasn’t the only one with a thing about mammary glands.’
It’s too funny not to laugh, but after a moment we both stop ourselves, embarrassed. ‘So she was a lesbian before you met?’
He sighs. ‘I expect you’ve read case-studies about things like this.’ I nod. ‘What do they conclude?’
‘Well, often what happens is that both partners think the homosexuality is just a phase, or something they can overcome. Love conquers all, etcetera. And sometimes it does.’
He looks up, relieved. He even musters another laugh. ‘So go on. I’m interested.’
‘OK. In your case, perhaps it turned out you were just Melina’s heterosexual experiment.’
He nods ruefully. ‘Is it that classic?’
‘Fairly. Sorry to tell you. And the turning point?’
‘When we learned she couldn’t have children. That’s when she gave up on the whole idea of men, I think. Or the whole idea of me. Somewhere along the way she met Agnesca.’
‘And since then you’ve been wary of forming new relationships.’
‘Understatement. Everything’s been on ice. Physically and emotionally.’ He looks anxious, then smiles. ‘Is that classic too?’
‘Speaking as your new therapist?’ I say. ‘It’s completely understandable. Your manhood took a knock. But it will pass, when the right person comes along, and if Jupiter’s in the ascendant. All shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. Julian of Norwich. That’ll be fifty quid.’
He smiles. ‘Worryingly cheap. But if it doesn’t pass? What if I carry on being…’
‘Reserved? Then stick to Belgian chocolate. Industrial doses are fine. A lot more satisfying.’
‘And you can do it alone.’
‘There’s this expectation that we should all be sexual beings, but the fact is, not all of us are, particularly.’ For some reason, as I am saying this, I am imagining the physicist’s erect penis.
‘That’s me. Depressed testosterone. I think basically Melina…’
‘Castrated you? Cliche. But no doubt true. Have you found a substitute passion?’
‘I worship increasingly at the shrine of food,’ he confesses as his dessert arrives, a confection of peaches, meringue and sorbet.
‘Since this,’ I say, indicating the chair, ‘sex isn’t high on my agenda either.’
‘You don’t miss it?’
‘It’s been so long I’ve practically forgotten,’ I lie. ‘But the men, they mind a lot.’
‘I bet they do!’ he says gallantly, deliberately misunderstanding, and I laugh again.
‘The guys at rehab, they were all obsessed with having sex again. Could they do it, could they give a woman pleasure, how soon could they try Viagra?’
‘And the women? How was it for you?’
‘There weren’t many of us, compared to the men. Men throw themselves around more, apparently. Congenital recklessness. So anyway, there were only two of us. The thing we wanted most had nothing to do with sex.’
‘I guess you’d want to stand up? Be your real height again, look people in the eye?’
I take in his slightly anxious brow, his thick, rust-coloured hair, his deep-set brown eyes with the green fleck in the left one, and feel immensely touched that he has bothered to imagine. I am not going to put him right. The fact is, not being able to stand up is not the worst thing. Not by a long, long way.
We have reached the coffee stage, when the manager, Harry, comes up to me. ‘You have a possibly unwelcome visitor. She says she’d like a moment of your time.’ Discreetly, he nods in the direction of the door. ‘She seems a bit off. If you don’t know her, I don’t mind asking her to leave.’
Dishevelled and defiant, she stands with her hands buried deep inside the pockets of a grubby beige jacket. The red-haired woman.
My guts tilt.
‘Who is it?’ asks the physicist, looking across.
‘My stalker,’ I say. ‘Just joking.’ Then nod reassuringly at Harry. ‘Yes, let’s do it. But take her jacket off her.’ I’m not taking any chances. As Harry heads over to the woman, I take a big gulp of wine.
‘Gabrielle, I don’t know what’s going on, but is this a good idea?’ asks the physicist.
‘It’s — inevitable. I’m glad it’s happened in a public place. It’ll be interesting. You’ll see.’ I have taught myself a long time ago not to say no to certain things just because they scare me, so in reality it’s an easy decision. But when I reassure him, I sound calmer than I feel.
She shuffles up and I see she’s younger than I’d thought. Early forties. She doesn’t look threatening: just lonely and deranged. She sees the picture of the sky-diver, still perched against the cruet set, and points. ‘Bethany drew that.’
Immediately, things fall into place. Of course. Who else could she be?
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Two weeks ago. Frazer Melville, this is Joy McConey, my predecessor at Oxsmith. She’s referring to the female patient I’ve been calling Child B.’
The physicist is clearly unsettled by the turn our evening has taken, but he adjusts quickly: after shaking Joy’s hand, he pulls up a chair for her. Waving away the waiter’s offer of a glass of mineral water, Joy McConey slides into the chair, leans her arms forward on the table and begins speaking urgently, her eyes flickering this way and that. ‘I can’t stay long, he’ll come for me. My husband,’ she explains hastily. ‘He won’t want me talking to you. But you have to listen. Bethany Krall’s much more dangerous than you think.’
It’s an odd assumption, that I find Bethany dangerous. ‘I’m listening. Tell me what you have to say.’
Frazer Melville is looking anxious and a bit resentful. ‘You know the reason Bethany gets things right, Gabrielle?’ Her voice is light, strained, almost girlish. ‘Can I call you Gabrielle, is that OK, you won’t feel it’s an intrusion?’ Her pale freckled face, tinged yellow by the flickering candlelight, veers at me asymmetrically. There has at some point been an attempt to apply mascara: the area below one eye is smudged with it. ‘I mean, I know what it must look like, I know you saw I was following you. But I had to warn you about Bethany.’
‘So does Bethany get things right?’ I ask, cocking an eyebrow at Frazer Melville. He rearranges his teaspoon.
‘Yes. You’ll see. I started paying attention after the cyclone that hit Osaka six months ago. She talked about it after her ECT, and then it happened. And then more things did.’ The physicist is looking at Joy McConey intently. ‘The Nepal earthquake. Now this hurricane, the fall of Christ — she predicted it, didn’t she? I mean, this drawing—’ she points at it.
‘So she claims.’
‘Well, believe me, that’s part of it.’ I can sense the physicist getting agitated. I shoot him a look that I hope conveys, Calm down. Therapists have breakdowns too. More than you’d think. Fact.
‘ I didn’t see your notes on Bethany. But I’d be very interested to hear what you wrote in them.’
‘She feels things. Blood and minerals. The way things flow.’ Frazer Melville stiffens. I can see now that Joy is trembling, as though she has just stepped in from a night of snow. ‘I told Sheldon-Gray and he wouldn’t listen. No one would. But her father, Leonard Krall. He knows what she’s capable of. I tried to warn people and so Sheldon-Gray got rid of me. And if you’re not careful, they’ll do the same to you. Ask Leonard. Ask him what he thinks. Ask him why he won’t visit his own daughter. She’ll try to get you to help her escape. And if you don’t, she’ll do what she did to me.’
‘Excuse me,’ interrupts a man’s voice. Then, ‘Joy.’ He approaches quickly, and I recognise him as the blond, balding man she argued with in the swimming pool car park. He looks firm and angry. But there’s shame in there too. Humiliation. His wife has gone nuts, in public. And he’s picking up the pieces. I wonder how often he has done this. ‘Let’s get you home to the kids now, Joy,’ he says, grabbing her hand and tugging. He is clearly at the end of his tether, beyond embarrassment. ‘Look, I’m SO sorry,’ he says, addressing me. ‘I’ve been trying to prevent this, believe me. Joy’s not herself at the moment.’
She looks at him with contempt. ‘My husband,’ she says with bitterness, ‘is a great believer in women keeping their mouths shut.’
‘It’s OK,’ I tell the man. ‘I’m interested. Please — Joy can stay if she wants. I’d like to hear what she has to say. Joy? What do you think Bethany did to you?’
But he is already steering her off. In the doorway, Joy turns.
‘Can’t you see what she’s doing, Gabrielle?’ she calls across the room. ‘She’s not just predicting things! She’s making them happen!’
The next morning the physicist arrives at Oxsmith wearing a frayed linen jacket and a tie that doesn’t match. He’s bearing a large square box wrapped in plain brown paper and strapped with duct tape, which he now plonks on my lap unceremoniously and without explanation.
‘Sure, just use me as a shopping trolley,’ I smile. ‘I’ll spit a coin back at you when you’re done. But you’ll have to push me because I can’t see zilch.’
He glances around the reception area nervously as I log him in. It’s the first time, he tells me, he’s been inside any kind of secure hospital. I can tell he’s excited at the prospect of meeting Bethany — but he’s wary, too.
‘It’s more hospital than prison, right?’
‘Most days,’ I tell him. ‘But it can flip the other way.’
Bethany is waiting in the interview room, chatting with a female nurse with multiple piercings. When the physicist offers her a handshake, Bethany shoots me a glance of ironic despair: haven’t I warned him she only does rude? I look away. I am not helping her out. Finally, flummoxed by the insistence of Frazer Melville’s huge, proffered hand, she sighs, grasps it and shakes it up and down three times — formally, like a mechanised puppet. Duty done.
‘Frazer Melville is a scientist from the university,’ I tell her.
‘Uh-huh. I’m honoured.’ She certainly does not intend to sound it.
‘Me too,’ he says, lifting the box from my lap. ‘So much so that I brought this gift for you.’
‘It’s not my birthday,’ she says gracelessly, eyeing him sideways, full of mistrust. But I can see curiosity fighting its way through the jaded façade.
He says, ‘In Japan, it’s traditional to bring a present when you visit someone’s house or apartment for the first time. I think it’s very civilised, so I’m trying to get it to catch on here.’
She snorts. ‘Well, welcome to my charming high-security home. As well as the tasteful colour choices, may I point out the bull dyke nurse here, and the bars on the windows, and the total lack of any view of the outside world, and’ — she is unpacking the box as she speaks. But when she glimpses what it contains, she stops dead and opens her mouth in an 0 of shock. She has lifted out a large globe made of light translucent plastic. She places it on the desk. I can see a struggle going on inside her. I know that her instinct is to articulate something positive — perhaps even blurt a thank you. But she can’t allow herself. I see her quelling it. Expressing a positive emotion would be against her principles.
‘There’s a bulb inside,’ says Frazer Melville, plugging the cord into the socket. The colours light up like the stained glass in a church, but they’re more subtle, more mesmerising and otherworldly. Bethany, still silent, gives the sphere a small push and we watch it spin a slow, elegant rotation. The surfaces of the landmasses, corrugated with contours, are tinted brown and shades of green, while the lakes shine a luminous turquoise. The oceans slide from one vivid blue to another according to depth. There are none of the usual demarcations of nations or cities: the only markings which relate in any way to the existence of humans are the Suez and Panama canals, and a thin, discreet tracery of lines indicating latitude, longitude and the Tropics. It’s pure geography. An unpeopled Earth.
‘If this is some kind of sick joke—’ Bethany begins, and then stops. For the first time, her terrible vulnerability is not hidden, and I can see its rawness.
‘I do jokes,’ says the physicist jovially. ‘But it’s been a while since I did any sick ones. It’s yours to keep.’
How often I’ve returned to that moment. Or more precisely, to the tentative smile that creeps across Bethany’s face as she presses her hands to the sphere, her long thin fingers, nails bitten to the quick, crawling across it like a blind person’s. I’m reminded of a vet I once saw, his eyes closed, his head pressed to the flank of a sick horse, prodding with his fingers and listening.
‘I’ll come and fetch you in twenty minutes and then we’ll go over to the art studio,’ I tell them. Because I still can’t bring myself to say ‘Creativity Workshop’. Especially in front of a man who—
A man who.
When I return, the globe is spinning slowly and they are both gazing at it thoughtfully. Lola, the nurse, has been standing near the door: she sends me a look that conveys an unfathomable mix of concern, alarm and pity, and jerks her head in the physicist’s direction.
‘Everything OK?’ I ask. But it’s clear from his face that something has gone wrong.
‘Cool,’ says Bethany. She looks sly — perhaps even ashamed. He says nothing and suddenly I’m aware of his freckles. They are standing out like sprinkles of brown sugar because the skin beneath them has paled. When I make a questioning face, he waves his hand dismissively. Lola again tries to communicate something but I can’t interpret her gesture. Bethany, on the other hand, is fired up, in the dangerous no-man’s-land where energetic becomes manic.
‘Bethany’s located the site of a forthcoming volcano, as well as an earthquake in Istanbul,’ says the physicist finally, giving a forced smile. But I sense this is not what he’s upset about. What has she said to him?
‘A volcano?’
‘I told you about it, Wheels,’ says Bethany, eagerly. The physicist looks shocked at my nickname, and glances at me questioningly, but I shake my head: let it go. ‘But I didn’t know the name of the island before.’
‘I identified it as Samoa,’ says the physicist, stopping the globe and indicating a dot in the ultramarine of the Pacific.
‘October the fourth,’ says Bethany. ‘It’s in my book. But now I can write down the name.’
We transfer to the art studio, with Lola accompanying us. As Frazer Melville inspects Bethany’s drawings, which I have pinned to the walls, he seems to recover slightly, making various ‘uh-huh’ and ‘I’m impressed’ and ‘what’s-this-then’ noises, while Bethany paces around the room like a caged creature, picking things up — a clay pot, a handful of brushes, a stub of eraser — and fiddling with them before plonking them down again. Above us, like a striped cocoon, hangs the hot-air balloon that Mesut Farouk has now nearly completed.
‘Are you familiar with van Gogh at all, Bethany?’ blurts the physicist, after a long silence.
‘Sure. The sunflowers, everyone knows them. Sold to the Japanese for, like, squillions. Went nuts and sliced off his ear, right? This place’d be home from home.’
‘I have some art books,’ I say, pointing at a shelf I can’t reach. Frazer Melville pulls down the relevant book and flips through to van Gogh. Irises. Women bent double picking up cut corn. Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear. ‘There are three in particular I’m looking for,’ he murmurs, then stops and points. ‘That’s one of them.’ Starry Night: a hallucinogenic nightscape dotted with luminous orbs of light, each with its own extravagant aura. Instantly, you can see why he has chosen it — not for the huge, white-hot stars themselves, or the cluster of cypress trees in the foreground, or the Provenqal landscape below, but for the wild churns of clouds between. It’s as though an entire skyful of vapour has been shoved in a giant washing machine and forced to spin there for all eternity.
‘See what I mean?’ The similarity with Bethany’s storm arabesques is striking. I feel unobservant for not having seen it before. ‘Van Gogh liked turbulence too,’ says the physicist, eyeing Bethany.
‘Yeah, well. Great minds think alike,’ she says dismissively. There is still something odd about her — a guilt, an uneasiness.
‘He captured it in an almost scientific way, without even realising it himself. People think of turbulence as being random but in fact it obeys very particular rules, which can be applied to liquids and gases.’
I wonder what he’s getting at. He seems to be expecting Bethany to make a comment — to add to what he has said, or know something about it, but she doesn’t.
‘Can I take these?’ he asks. ‘I’d like to make copies.’
‘Sure,’ Bethany says. She’s trying to sound blase. but the enthusiasm with which she tears the first one off the wall and shoves it at him tells another story.
‘Can you sell them to the Japanese?’
His smile is tight and it fades fast. It’s clear she has unnerved him in a way I have yet to fathom. And now he’s is a hurry to leave. I’m ready to go, too. It’s nearly three and I have a session with a new kid who arrived yesterday, an arsonist fresh from police custody. Taking his leave of Bethany with another awkward handshake, Frazer Melville says he would like her to do some more drawings for him. Of anything she likes, anything at all.
‘Gabrielle showed me your sketch of Christ the Redeemer falling in Rio,’ he says, hesitantly. ‘I was impressed by it. Were you aware, when you drew it, what it was?’
She shrugs. ‘I can’t remember. I see lots of stuff, I don’t always know what it means.’
‘I remember you mentioned the fall of Christ,’ I tell her.
‘Whatever,’ she says, dismissively.
I look from Bethany to the physicist and back again. There’s something awry.
‘She shouldn’t call you Wheels,’ says Frazer Melville firmly as I am signing him out at Reception. ‘Why do you let her?’
‘Because, believe it or not, it’s a sign of affection. And it beats Spaz. Now let me ask you a question. What was it that she said to you?’
‘When?’
‘When I left you alone. She said something that got to you.’
‘No,’ he says, pretending to look puzzled. ‘Apart from the earthquake, and this volcano in Samoa, she didn’t say anything specific.’
I don’t call him on it. But I note, for future reference, that the physicist is an appalling liar.
I am in the art studio with Newton, a schizophrenic sixteen-year-old with gender identity issues. He likes art. For the past hour he has been working in clay, producing squat crocodilian figures with gaping jaws and sharp teeth. Like most of the kids, he has a history of violence. His entry-ticket to Oxsmith last month was his confession to the sexual torture of his two young cousins. He’s on a wide panoply of drugs, some of which cause his hands to shake. Pale-faced, he dyes his hair white-blond and wears badly applied make-up — today, a gash of red lipstick. Giant fluffy slippers engulf his feet, and he sweats monstrously, malodorously and with what almost seems like gusto. It’s ten in the morning, and Newton is idly spinning Bethany’s globe.
‘You get the fuck away from that.’ I haven’t been expecting her to come in. Rafik is escorting her, and it’s clear from the glow on her face that she’s recently received a fresh surge of electricity to the brain.
‘Show us your cunt first, girl,’ he says conversationally. In the youth culture of Oxsmith Adolescent Secure Psychiatric Hospital, it’s a mundane enough demand. But Newton’s too new here to know about Bethany. No one’s warned him that tiny does not mean harmless. Casually, Newton dips his hand in a pot of milky wet clay and pulls it out, dripping. ‘Nice and wet,’ he murmurs. If you could stop time, could you stop disasters, or would terrible things happen anyway, in a parallel world that had no respect for your mental flow charts? ‘Go on, babes, show us your gash.’ He holds up his hand and the pale slurry slides down and drips to the floor. ‘Then I’ll stick this up you. Give you a good fist-fuck.’
Rafik and I exchange a look of agreement that one of them has to go. I silently vote for Bethany. The art studio isn’t big enough for her and anyone else. When Newton smiles, the lipstick smears his teeth so he looks like a carnivore after an orgy of raw meat. Before I can intervene, he has slapped Bethany’s globe with his clay-whitened hand, smearing it with a wet trail that loops around it like a filthy halo, smudging the equator. Then: ‘Show us your cunt. Go on. Let’s see what you got, girl.’
And now it’s escalating. ‘Get the fuck off it,’ Bethany says. Her voice has become flat and expressionless and for that reason I’m alarmed.
‘Show us your cunt. Then come and suck my big black dick.’ Newton is enjoying himself.
‘Right, Newton,’ I cut in sharply, and motion to Rafik to move in. ‘Step back from the table now please,’ I say. ‘Step right back.’
‘She means it,’ says Rafik, bracing his torso menacingly. If you’re not brutalised and fundamentally darkened before you come to a place like this, you surely are by the time you leave. No matter what your role.
Newton laughs and shakes his head as though this is the funniest thing he’s heard in a long time, then thwacks the globe with the flat of his hand. The ball spins at increasing speed, its colours whirring into one another. Another swipe, harder again, and it teeters drunkenly.
Bethany moves so fast I miss it.
With a deep animal shriek, she has catapulted herself at Newton, grabbing him by the hair and wrenching him off the now toppling globe. It crashes to the floor with an inevitability that’s almost hilarious, cartoon-like. It bounces once without breaking, then lands a second time with a bright smash, busting into a skitter of shards. Still shrieking, Bethany begins pummelling Newton with her fists. The giant slippers go flying. Rafik flings himself down and tries to wrestle the two kids apart. Quickly, I pull the cap off my alarm and reach for the spray-can under my seat. But events have overtaken me. With a hefty reactive kick, Newton has dislodged the central worktop from its trestle, and a tray of half-finished clay figures crashes to the floor, along with a pot of brushes in white spirit. Bethany, Newton and Rafik are now thrashing around in clay and chemicals and broken plastic. Kicked a second time by Newton’s flailing foot, the worktop gives up the fight with gravity and tips heavily towards me. I grab the side but it’s a bad move. Its weight forces my chair on to one wheel so that I am half-trapped beneath it, balanced uneasily and askew, while the other wheel spins in thin air. I’m aware of the door bursting open and six male nurses rushing in to overpower Bethany. Trying to break my inevitable fall, I push hard at the table-top — only to collapse with it, sideways, cracking the side of my head on the floor as I’m thrown right out of the chair.
And then blackness.
But my concussion doesn’t last long enough. When I come to I am still in the art studio and there’s blood everywhere. A wide smear leads to Newton, who has rolled over to the side of the room. He’s screaming and clutching his groin, which is blossoming with a red stain of blood. Rafik has Bethany pinned to the floor in an arm-lock. Through half-closed eyes, I watch her get stabbed in the buttock with a syringe. Our therapy session is over. On balance, I would not rate it a success.
The next morning, having been kept in St Swithin’s hospital overnight for supervision, I am taken home in an ambulance. I am lucky not to have been badly injured. There’s a wound on the back of my head, and another on my thigh which I can’t feel and must therefore take particular care of. Bethany is in isolation. Her hand was cut by the plastic she used to stab Newton with, but the injury was superficial and treated on the spot. Newton was less fortunate. He’s still at St Swithin’s, on the operating table, having a plastic shard removed from his scrotum. He will probably lose his right testicle.
I wonder how the loss of Bethany’s globe has affected her. How she’ll manage on 24-hour assessment for the next two days. The part of me that’s still professional cares. But the woman who has just come back from hospital with a head injury which required nurses to shave ten square centimetres of hair off her scalp, wants her to stay locked up in solitary confinement for all eternity. And while they’re at it, they can throw away the key. Sometimes it’s OK to hate mad people.
Frazer Melville arrives to cook us dinner. There were delicate telephone negotiations concerning this, at the end of which it was agreed that if I set the table and promise to wear ‘a killer frock’, he would do the rest. After I have told him the story of the fight, and the fate of his short-lived gift, and my redefinition of the expression bad hair day, we agree that the fact Bethany is being kept in isolation until further notice is advantageous. With no access to television or the internet — not that I’ve had the impression she is a fan — it’s a good way of ensuring she doesn’t surf for clues, or tune in to the weather channel, if that’s what she has been doing. Which can’t be ruled out. There is also a tacit agreement that having discussed her by phone, we will banish her as a topic of conversation for the rest of the evening. I hope we can stick to it.
Are there any sweeter pleasures in life than seeing a man cooking enticing, unusual food in your kitchen, and enjoying himself so much that he says ‘oh yes!’ and ‘magnificent’ as he chops carrots and grates nutmeg and squeezes lemon juice? If there are I don’t know of them.
‘I do envy men their colossal levels of self-belief,’ I say, watching the physicist at work.
For some reason, the killer frock I have chosen (olive green linen, with cream flecks) has a very low neckline and I have taken special care with my make-up. I have even, rather ridiculously, put on a pair of green high heels which I bought in the world of Before. They match my dress so perfectly they could have been designed especially for it. When I left rehab they told me always to wear shoes one size too large to prevent my feet getting pressure sores, but when the time came to put the green shoes in the box for the charity shop along with all the others, vanity triumphed over reason. So here I sit in my green dress with matching shoes, with my hair arranged to cover the bald patch, hoping it’s all worth it, but secretly fearing I look like a blow-up sex toy.
‘The self-belief is well-deserved in my case,’ he says breezily. ‘Your taste buds are in for a culinary extravaganza. Those wanky Michelin star chefs in London can eat their hearts out. Here, have a glass of wine. So. Has Bethany sliced off her ear yet? Actually, don’t answer that.’
While the physicist slices and mixes and tastes, I show him some of my drawings and paintings, my collection of art books, and my thunder egg.
‘It’s handed down the generations,’ I say, passing it to him. ‘Usually at weddings. Very symbolic. The story is that one day it’ll hatch.’
‘A nice specimen,’ he says, wiping his hands on his apron and examining it. ‘And it’ll crack open one day, of its own accord, you claim?’
‘And a dinosaur will emerge. Or a sea-monster according to some versions.’ He laughs and snips off a stalk from the chive-pot and pops the end in his mouth, then puts a strand in mine. We chew on them like two cows considering the merits of a certain type of pasture as he chops the rest with a chef’s expertise. ‘It’s a kind of fertility symbol, I guess.’
‘And are you supposed to — incubate this thing? Sit on it like a hen?’
‘Well, if anyone’s adapted for that, it’s me.’
‘And if it doesn’t hatch in your lifetime?’ he asks, a smile playing. ‘As I am sorry to tell you, I suspect it may not?’
‘Well I’d have to pass it on, I suppose. Or I could adopt an orphan.’
‘How about Bethany? Then you and I could get married and we’d be a family.’
He doesn’t realise what he has said. I draw in my breath, then quickly let out a laugh. ‘A turbulence expert, a psychotic murderess and the owner of a magic egg. Sounds like a winning threesome.’
‘You’re a shrink, you could keep us on a level.’ I reach across to slap his backside, an intimacy which gives me a certain thrill. ‘And I would promise to never, ever patronise you,’ he adds, patting me condescendingly on the head.
Although I am no cook, I happen to love food. The first course consists of scallops with an artichoke puke and crumbled Italian blood sausage, which I declare to be ‘mind-blowing’ because I have never tasted anything quite like it before, even in unusual dreams. Next comes venison with a cranberry and blue cheese sauce and a potato gratin. ‘You’re a dangerous man and you might well end up killing me,’ I tell him.
‘You have a strange way with compliments. But save room for my pièce de résistance. Three kinds of chocolate. A chocolate-stuffed chocolate blob known as a "torte" with chocolate sauce and a side-serving of chocolate mousse. Garnished with a sprig of mint, so if you decide you’re dieting, you can eat the foliage and I’ll scoff the rest.’
Afterwards, replete, we go out on to my little terrace where the air smells of honeysuckle and night stock and we watch the ridiculously huge sinking orb of the sun, and the physicist talks about his mother who died two months ago, in Aberdeen, of pancreatic cancer. He didn’t blame her for drinking herself stupid: the morphine wasn’t doing its job properly. He both misses her and feels relief. ‘Bodies,’ he concludes. ‘Great when they work, and terrible when they don’t.’ He reddens. ‘Oh fuck. What a stupid gaffe.’
‘It’s not a gaffe. I agree with you as a matter of fact. I won’t start telling you I wouldn’t have it any other way. It basically sucks.’
He shifts in the wicker chair. It’s too small for him. If he lived with me, I’d buy him a grandiose armchair that he could spread out in. Something physicist-sized. Expensive and expansive. A chair he can lean back in and hold forth from, Scottishly. I’d—
‘What was life like, before?’ he asks. He isn’t looking at me, and his big clumsy freckled hands seem to be comforting each other. ‘Since you’re being tolerant of my, er, emotional illiteracy, is that what you people call it?’
When our eyes meet, I realise he really does need to know. I’ve thought about this. How to tell him. But Bethany is needling at me. What does she know about me, or think that she knows? What did she tell him that afternoon at Oxsmith?
‘There’s a photo album on the lower shelf in the living-room. Fetch it and I’ll show you.’
There are pictures of my parents, and of Pierre and his wife and the twins as babies, and then older, and then Dad in the nursing home with one of the carers, and some others of me and Alex. I can see the physicist struggling with what to say when he sees me in the world of Before. I was a woman then. Happy, and upright and smiling, with a man’s arms around me.
‘Well, you were never tall,’ he comments. I smile. ‘Who’s the lucky guy?’
‘Oh, that’s all over,’ I say, trying to sound dismissive. But I fail.
‘Were you married?’
Through a gap in the trellis, I see an Ikea delivery van lumber past. I imagine a child’s bunk bed and the diagram of how to assemble it with an Allen key. Someone’s asking for trouble. ‘I wasn’t. But he was.’ A white van. Then a motorcycle. And then a Volkswagen Passat. ‘Alex had a Saab. They’re supposed to be very safe. Dark blue. There was a child seat in the back, with a little built-in rattle gizmo. He had two kids. If you were kissing in the car and you switched on the CD player by accident, out came "The Wheels on the Bus go Round and Round".’
‘Oh.’
‘He’d take off his wedding ring when we were in bed. Very respectful. But she was still there like an invisible presence. There was this band where the skin was paler.’
You get so used to editing out the painful stuff. There are still things I’m not telling the physicist, but this is enough for now.
How can I tell him what I’m not even telling myself? He’s looking at me intently, as though he’s aware I am leaving out something crucial. As though Bethany has told him—
Told him what?
Alex wasn’t my usual type at all, I say quickly, determined not to let my paranoia take charge. He was an entrepreneur, with a chain of clothes shops all over the country. We met in the casino he part-owned. He had a passion for poker. My friend Lily dragged me there because she was in between marriages, and there was a croupier she fancied. Well. One thing led to another. We all make mistakes. You can’t make an omelette, etcetera. ‘Only at the end of it all, there was no omelette,’ I finish lamely, appalled at my own cliche. Broken eggs, empty shells, messes on floors: why can’t I just tell the plain truth? Because I can’t. I know the next question, the one that usually goes unasked. To get this excruciating stage over with, I answer it anyway.
‘He was driving. The weather was terrible. I have no memory of how it happened. But we were arguing at the time.’ This is a mixture of lies and truth, fact and wishful thinking. I have rewritten this story in my head a thousand times. ‘We wanted a life together but he just couldn’t — bring himself to do what was needed.’ He had a problem with commitment. How I despise that phrase women use to explain why men won’t marry them. The phrase that says, it’s not me, it’s him. Another phrase from women’s magazines: he wanted to have his cake and eat it.
‘I loved him. But inevitably, given the situation, I also hated him.’
I don’t tell him the rest. About the impossibility of it all, and about why I was screaming at Alex when he rounded the corner and why I was still screaming at him — shamefully, uncontrollably, like a woman possessed — when he misjudged the turn. About the slow and quiet way he died.
I don’t tell him because I don’t tell myself. I’ve been through enough.
‘I used to think about it the whole time.’ Truth.
‘And now?’
‘I’ve cut it down to once a week.’ Lie. I think about him every day. Every single fucking day.
‘Did it make you feel, well, bitter? I mean, not just losing him, but losing — er — having your injuries?’ The physicist is looking at me strangely, as though he knows what I’m not saying. How can I give utterance to the thing I can’t think about, and can’t face, and never will? How can I ever tell anyone?
Finally, to distract us both, I talk about the aftermath of the accident. About my lost month in a coma, and how when I emerged from it into something that passed for consciousness, I discovered myself on an angled bed which they adjusted three times a day like a cooking-spit. The morphine prompted extraordinary, hallucinatory dreams. I was a mountaineer scaling a white cliff a kilometre high, attached by a thicket of pulleys and ropes. I was the commander of a tiny, high-speed submarine, zooming beneath the quilt of the sea, negotiating abysses and sharks and whirlpools and giant octopuses like a manic conquistador. Sometimes, surreally, I’d see people in hospital gowns standing upright and gliding about the ward like ghosts. Later I learned these were other patients in standup wheelchairs. The drugs ensured that most explanations slid past me. ‘As soon as you’re ready for some physio, we’ll put you on a tilt-table to help your heart work harder,’ they said one day. Medical scaffolding, to coax my broken body into mustering muscular life. Could my heart really work any harder? Apparently yes, it would have to, because one day a destroyed woman came to see me. She stood there for a long time. She didn’t say a word. I knew who she was. I’d seen photos. She scrutinised me as if I were a pitiful and disgusting and shameful specimen and then she turned and walked away. She could have come and killed me but she didn’t. She could see there was no need. That leaving me like this was crueller because I was my own punishment. She was a sociologist, so perhaps she could name the category I’d fit into as a woman with no man, no baby, no feeling below the waist, and no imaginable future. I never saw her again. The morphine made it unreal, like a dream with no beginning or end. But a routine began to emerge. I forgot and remembered things selectively. You can only take so much pain. Every day, three times a day for six weeks, I was pitched at a new angle, to relieve the pressure on my shattered spine and pelvis.
‘It’s funny, but I was in that spinal injuries unit for at least ten days before I realised I wasn’t alone. I thought the other voices I heard were in my head. It turned out there were ten of us. Nine other broken people all sandwiched on their beds at different angles. Or strapped into standing frames. I was the only woman.’
The others were young, mostly: three motorcycle accident victims, a builder who had fallen off a ladder, a man who had jumped off the fourth floor of a block of flats in a suicide attempt. A boy — he said he was just sixteen — had the strangest voice: a rasping noise with each breath emerging heavily, as though at great cost. Later I learned he was the worst off of all of us. He was paralysed from the neck, and on a ventilator. The wheezing that accompanied his speech came from the machine.
‘People came and went. The suicide died one night, so at least his wish came true.’
We were all very drugged, in the wake of our accidents, so there wasn’t a great deal of talking. Instead, there was a lot of dreaming. ‘I travelled endlessly on that bed, in my head, just taking in what had happened to Alex. I travelled to the moon. I travelled beyond it. In an odd way, it was liberating, being just a brain, suspended in space. There was no panic at that stage, because no one had told me I’d never walk again.’
‘They wanted to spare you?’
‘No, it wasn’t that. It was because nobody knew. I was in spinal shock. The body just closes down. It can be months before you know what you’re stuck with. I was drugged, and I was calm. It was there that I first learned how to disappear into myself. How to squash and stretch time.’
He looks fascinated, puzzled, a little excited. Horrified, too, by the image of Hell I have sketched. I wonder how much he’s understanding. Can anyone who hasn’t experienced this imagine what it’s like, to watch whole hours spin by in seconds, or feel seconds loop into eternity? To go on long elaborate voyages of the imagination in which you can become whole new people? To realise that there’s nothing you can’t do, nobody you can’t be, if you allow your mind to float? I tell the physicist that it was towards the end of that time that I learned the worst of what had happened to me, and what it meant for my future. I do not tell him that it was then, in those weeks, that I made the decision to eradicate Alex — and all that went with him: the wife, the kids, their complex family grief — from my mind. There are limits to human endurance. Something opened up inside me, a new skill that unfurled like a flower, there on that torture-bed. I relived my whole life, sometimes in the most elaborate detail, but I also imagined lives that had gone and lives that might have been.
The physicist’s look is so unprocessed I can’t take it, because other people’s pity is unbearable. So is sympathy. And so is moral disapproval. I look away.
I have not told him that most of all, on those long inner journeys, I imagined a boy called Max with blue eyes and brown hair. I saw him first as a baby, and then growing up. When he was tiny I gave him crayons to draw with and clay to mush, then later I showed him the work of painters and sculptors, I taught him to fry eggs, watched him battling with scuba gear, listened to the story of how he fell in love.
The physicist has taken my hand. He is stroking it. He is looking into my eyes so intently that I have to gabble.
‘Afterwards, right from the start,’ I go on, quickly, to get it over with, ‘I wanted two things. I wanted to work again, as soon as possible. And I wanted to walk.’ He nods again, and turns his face away because I suspect there are tears, which he has correctly guessed I would not wish to see, because they’d make me think less of him, and perhaps hate him too, to the point of violence.
‘Who wouldn’t?’ he mutters. He had better be very careful here. Does he realise that if he feels sorry for me, I will get out my thunder egg and smash his head in with it?
‘At which point the very nice and well-meaning therapist invited me to "untangle" what was "realistic" and what wasn’t,’ I go on, determined to get this over with. I take another swoosh of wine. ‘Untangle, unravel, unpack, deconstruct. You get to hate the jargon, when you’re not the one who’s using it. Actually you hate it when you are too. She got me filling in the kind of psychological questionnaires I used to design, right at the beginning of my career.’
‘Humiliating?’ he asks. He’s blinking. They told us in rehab to watch out for people who want to help you, who make a beeline for you because you are needy, who want to be your saviour. Cripple pervs. If that’s what this is about, he can leave.
‘It was humiliating to begin with. But then interesting. Denial of reality can be helpful. Something blind and ungracious and determined took over. I made it take over. I realised that if I could work myself into a kind of righteous rage, almost a political rage, I could do things. I became evangelical about life going on as normal. I was going to start again, faster than anyone else, better than anyone else, and what’s more, in a new place. I didn’t want to be judged against what I was before. I wanted to be among strangers who’d never known me as someone who could walk. I wanted to present this as a fait accompli. I wanted to say, here I am, and this is what I am, so fuck you.’
The physicist smiles. ‘I can see that. And that’s one of the reasons—’ He stops. ‘You’re cleverer than I am, Gabrielle. And you have a mean streak. So listen. You’re not to ridicule me and make me feel like a twat.’
‘Just please don’t tell me you admire me for my courage.’
‘I wasn’t going to,’ he says, standing up and moving his chair away from me. ‘Put your arms round my neck,’ he says, leaning down. I reach up to him. The physicist’s chest is broad, as warm as bread from the oven. I can feel the thump of his heart. Which means he can feel mine too. ‘Hold on tight.’ He’s clasping my whole torso close to his. ‘I was going to say,’ he says, lifting me bodily out of the chair and settling me against him with my knees over the crook of his arm. He is big and I am small but I’m still worried that I must feel like a sack of potatoes though he bears my weight as if it’s nothing. Then his face is next to mine and he’s rocking us both. We stay like that for a while, swaying together in the warm night air. The sky has darkened and the moon is a pallid crescent. It’s absurd. It’s romantic. It’s ridiculous. I love it and I want to die, but not in the way I usually want to die. ‘What I was going to say was, it’s one of the reasons I keep wanting to do this.’
‘What, weight-training?’ Why can’t I stop myself?
‘Spoil it again and I’ll drop you. Just shut up and listen because I’m being romantic here.’ Yes, I think. You are. And I can’t handle it. It will kill me. It will kill my belief that I am no longer a woman. No, worse, it will revive the hope that I am, and then all that can happen is that it will be shredded. I close my eyes. ‘It’s one of the reasons I keep wanting to hold you in my arms,’ says the physicist. ‘And then kiss you.’
‘Did you like that?’ he says finally, as our lips part. It was spectacularly potent. I am like a recovering alcoholic going back on the booze. I’d forgotten what kissing was like, what kissing does to the rest of you. But my body — what’s left of it — hadn’t. Hasn’t. Is now in a turmoil of wanting, and not knowing how to get, how to have.
‘Frazer Melville.’ It’s as though his name has been trapped inside me and his kiss has released it. He settles me on the sofa, still holding me close. ‘Frazer Melville, Frazer Melville, Frazer Melville.’ Like my Spanish mantra, it’s similar to rolling a strange taste around on my tongue, a taste I could get addicted to. I want more. Of his name, of everything, of him.
He pulls back to look at me. ‘Answer my question.’ He sounds proud but a little pinch of worry has appeared on the bridge of his nose. ‘Did you like it?’
When no human being of the opposite sex, public health professionals excepting, has touched you intimately in two years—
The feel of another body. The press of lips. It’s too much for me. I am done for.
‘Well,’ I say, trying to sound hard-boiled but failing. ‘The thing is, I’m supposed to have an insight into people’s psyches. And an understanding of body language and the human impulse. It’s the basic job description.’
‘Meaning?’
‘That if you were giving out any signals, I missed them.’
‘But your lack of professional skills aside, my question was: did you like it?’
‘No. I hated it,’ I say. I am aware of the muscles around my mouth. They are doing something they’re not used to doing. It’s not that I don’t smile, I realise. It’s that I don’t normally smile this wide. It’s the mad banana smile from my nephew’s birthday card. No, I didn’t pick up his signals. Not properly. But he picked up mine: the ones I only half-knew I was giving. Oh, OK. The cleavage thing, the make-up, the perfume, the straight-out-of-hospital-into-green-stilettos — I know. But. ‘But just to be sure, why not do it again two or three more times,’ I say coolly, pulling a swatch of hair across my bald patch. ‘And I’ll let you know my final decision.’
In rehab, I read a manual about paralysis and sexuality, entitled Sex Matters. A good, self-explanatory title, involving a mini-pun, as titles often do. Sex Matters recommends that you and your partner take things slowly. That when contemplating sex, you explain to him, if he doesn’t know already, what that might involve. What can go wrong, what positions might be favoured, what embarrassing accidents might occur. Screw that. Screw taking things slowly. Despite the bandaged wound on my thigh, and the fact I must be extra careful with it, and despite the bald patch on my head, I want to know what it’s like. Now. With the physicist. With the physicist Frazer Melville. Whether he is ready for it or not.
‘Kiss me again, Frazer Melville,’ I tell him. ‘And then take me to bed.’
Later, as I fall asleep next to him, with the fan churning the hot night-air across our skin, I know something important. I am still a woman whose body can experience physical delight. A woman who has missed, more than she ever admitted, the intimacy, tenderness and intensity of sex. And if her lower section can’t muster an orgasm, her nipples and brain most certainly can.
The trouble with the principle of ‘time out’ is that one patient’s personal hell is another’s idea of a cushy number. Like any bottomless pit, Bethany Krall, freshly ensconced in the peer-free zone referred to as ‘seclusion’, is enjoying the increased attention levels she is receiving. Therapist contact has been upped to five hours a day in the wake of her attack on Newton, and she is on ‘one-to-one’: 24-hour risk-assessment with a nurse in continuous attendance, who will be watching for self-harming behaviour. We’re on a rota basis. Her food is brought in on a tray. ‘Room service,’ she calls it: that, too, suits her current narcissistic mood. When she needs the toilet, she is escorted there by Lola or another female nurse, who keeps her in full view at all times. Lola has told me that Bethany makes the most of this, and performs scatological running commentaries for the benefit of her audience. We discuss the damage she has inflicted but she is unrepentant. Instead, she is eager to know the gory details. In particular, which part of the globe the surgeon extracted from Newton’s scrotum when removing his irretrievably damaged testicle.
‘I’m betting it was Scandinavia. As in Norway, Finland, Sweden and Denmark.’ If nothing else, it seems her knowledge of geography has expanded, thanks to the atlas she’s brought in with her.
‘Perhaps if you stay in solitary confinement long enough, you’ll eventually get an education and become Bethany Krall, Professor of Earth Sciences,’ I suggest. She laughs, a dirty, full-throated laugh that is too old for her, and the braces on her teeth flash in the light. Twinkle twinkle. There has been a lot of gaiety from Bethany since she has been moved to a bare cell in McGrath Wing, where we now find ourselves, with Rafik in attendance. But none of it is of the balanced-member-of-the-community variety.
‘I wonder if that episode reminded you of anything that happened two years ago, at home?’
She smiles patronisingly. ‘Wrong questions again, Wheels. You’re one fuck of a slow learner. By the time you get what’s going on, you and your spazmobile will be, like, ten metres underwater. Bibble babble, with bubbles. Hey, joke.’ Oh well, I think. So be it. Nothing can get me down today. I smile benignly at little Bethany Krall because I can afford to.
I am a woman who has had sex.
I could ask for more intensive sessions with Bethany in the wake of her attack on Newton. But resuming our previous arrangement would run counter to protocol as the hospital’s bureaucratese has it. Nor am I keen to risk further interrogation from Sheldon-Gray, after my recent debriefing with him, which took the form of questions fired at me from the rowing machine.
‘How’s Newton doing in hospital? Ungk. Are you sure you have the physical backup you need for this job? Gah. Has your confidence taken a battering in the wake of this? Ungk. Have you done your police statement? Do you need some time off, now that the thing’s been paperworked?’
I struggled to answer him coherently and convincingly as he to’d-and-fro’d, shovelling his sweaty air from one side of the room to the other, as though it were a task he could later tick off the day’s list: transport X molecules of gas from A to B. I stuck to my plan of keeping it short. The tiny digital clock on his exercise device showed me that our entire conversation lasted one minute forty-eight seconds. At the end of which I showed him the drawing Bethany had made of the stick-figure.
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Good work. Pursue it.’
I told him I would, and left.
‘That stick-figure you did in red crayon,’ I now ask Bethany. ‘Which I think was probably your mother. What were you thinking about, when you drew it?’
‘I don’t do stick-figures,’ she says sullenly. I take it out of my folder and show it to her. She squints, frowns and shoves the drawing back at me with a stumped expression. ‘Not mine. Someone else must have done it. Someone who can’t draw for shit.’
‘I was with you. After you drew the fall of Christ, you did this.’
‘I don’t draw like that. That’s a kid’s drawing.’
‘I wonder what the kid who drew it was thinking.’
We look at each other a moment, and then she turns her face away.
It dawned on me, during the labyrinthine discussions I used to have with my psychoanalyst, that most women carry in their heads an idealised mother. A home-baking, perfect-gravy mother, a waiting-outside-the-school-gates mother, a mother with whom to share lip-gloss and T-shirts, a mother to confide in, to laugh with over a TV sitcom. A counterweight to the mother they have in real life — the mother who, in Bethany’s case, filled her so unassailably with the urge to kill that she reached for a Phillips screwdriver and made the rest history.
‘You just don’t get it,’ she mutters. ‘Look. This earthquake is right round the corner. It’s hitting Istanbul the day after tomorrow. The pressure’s building up in the faultline, I can feel it. I’m telling you. I was right about the hurricane. I was right about Jesus tumbling down the mountainside. What happens when you see I’m right about this, too?’
‘What would you like me to do, Bethany? If you were right?’
‘It’s just time someone believed me. Don’t you get it?’
Our time is up: Rafik opens the door on my nod. As I turn to leave, Bethany is looking at me intently, as though measuring the angles of my face. Then, fast as a change of wind, her mood has shifted and she’s laughing softly to herself.
‘What’s funny, Bethany?’ I ask lightly, pleased that we are back on safer ground. ‘Can I share the joke?’
‘Wow, Wheels,’ she laughs, delightedly. ‘You’re the joke. Congratulations.’
‘On what?’ I ask, uneasy.
She smiles to show the braces on her teeth. She says slowly, savouring it: ‘On getting laid.’ I roll an inch back. ‘Ha! A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me, he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts!’
‘My private life is my business, Bethany.’ It comes out too sharply. She has caught me unawares and I have let it show.
‘Not any more,’ she grins. ‘Hey. My beloved is unto me as a cluster of camphire in the vineyards of Engedi. He stuck it in you! Rejoice!’
Rafik turns away discreetly. Bidding them both a swift goodbye I roll speedily out.
Since half of my body withdrew from the game, I have learned to notice, relish and even fetishise life’s miniature but extreme delights. Like my oriental lilies opening in a splash of ghost-white petals and filling the flat with their alarming, erotic pungency. Or my Bulgarian choral music drifting through from the next room, mingled with homelier noises: a metallic clatter, an air-blast of burnt toast, and the muttered cursing of a physicist called Frazer Melville preparing, at my request, a pot of lapsang souchong tea in an unfamiliar kitchen. It is Thursday August 21st, but I am determined not to let Bethany’s catastrophe calendar — which predicts a massive earthquake tomorrow — spoil my day. So far I am succeeding. I am enjoying being myself and no one else. I may even have looked in the mirror and taken pleasure in my own reflection. Frazer Melville and I have been under my duvet for the best part of fourteen hours. We have been ‘experimenting’. We are absurd. We are a woman in her thirties and a man in his forties. And we’re behaving like two teenagers discovering sex for the first time. Frazer Melville and I probe, explore and exchange information — shyly, boldly, teasingly. What if I do this? That’s good. Not there. But there, like this. No: can’t feel a thing. A lot of the focus is on my breasts. Hallelujah: I have landed myself a tit man. Last night, he cautiously entered me again. I felt nothing physically, not even a phantom tweak of something residual in my pelvis. But in my head it was quite another matter. In my head it was explosive. In our different but perhaps not-so-different ways, Frazer Melville and I appear to be enjoying ourselves.
But it can’t last. I can’t let it.
I say, ‘We have to do something.’
He sighs, shifts, perches his head on his elbow, looks at me hard, and takes a deep breath before he speaks.
‘I agree.’
‘So if it hits tomorrow—’
‘I contact scientist colleagues with the other predictions Bethany’s made.’
I am more relieved than I care to admit that he has been giving the idea consideration.
‘Without mentioning her,’ I specify. ‘She can’t be named.’
‘Of course. In any case it would be scientific suicide.’
‘How will you go about it?’
He shrugs. ‘I tell a selected cross-section of scientists who I know to be open-minded, that some predictions have been made by a certain source. That they’ve proved accurate. That the earthquake’s the latest example of this. That there are further predictions which will need testing. That I believe there’s a scientific explanation which demands investigation. But more importantly, the regions concerned would benefit from being warned because lives are at stake.’
It sounds simple. Too simple. But at least we have a plan.
We lie in bed until midday and then go and see a genial, forgettable movie. He is not used to being so close to the screen, and I am not used to being kissed in my wheelchair during a film, and attracting whistles from the people in the rows behind us. So it’s a new experience for both of us. If either of us has an apprehension that this might be the last day that our world is happily balanced, we hide it well.
Sex is many things, but that night, for us, it is an urgent and elaborate distraction from the subject we are both determined to avoid, now that we’ve agreed on a strategy. Frazer Melville undresses me and makes me close my eyes. I must promise not to move a centimetre ‘or it will all go wrong’. Intrigued I wait, rigid, smiling. I feel him take his clothes off. Then I feel him come close to me. I smell chocolate. Then he touches my left nipple, but not with his tongue. With something cool and heavy. He works slowly on whatever he is doing. I feel his concentration. Half-guessing what he is up to, an electric pulse spreads outward from my breasts across my shoulders and spine, along my arms, into the tips of my fingers, across the back of my neck.
‘Now this one.’ He caresses my right nipple, the same cool pressure, and I feel the flesh swell.
‘Open your eyes.’
He has painted my nipples with chocolate paste. Where did the paste, and indeed the idea, come from? They are huge and nearly black. They glisten. I laugh. ‘Well, I knew you were fond of chocolate.’
‘Two of my favourite things both at once,’ he murmurs. His voice is thick. Frazer Melville’s erect penis is sticking out of his fly. I take it in my hand, feel its heft. ‘I can’t wait any more,’ he says. ‘I’m starving.’ And then he’s sucking my breasts and we are both getting smeared with melting chocolate. He has discovered a way of propping me up using pillows and cushions. Me naked except for the bandage on my leg, he fully clothed. I feel like a greedy queen being worshipped and serviced.
Looking into my eyes, Frazer Melville takes me and takes me and takes me. I can’t feel a thing. But as he moves back and forth inside me he says my name over and over again. I gasp, utterly confounded. And I think: perhaps I am still a woman after all. No, not perhaps. Yes, yes, I am. A woman who can make love, and drive a man—
He comes with the raucous, unashamed cry of a caveman.
I’m woken at one by rain slamming against the windows. Outside the trees sigh and creak. I settle my head on Frazer Melville’s solid, smooth-skinned shoulder and think about what last night did to my soul. Cuando te tengo a ti vida, cuanto te quiera. But then I remember the date and the rapture quietly deflates. I reach out and switch on the radio, turning the sound down low. I get the BBC World Service, stalwart friend of the hardened insomniac. There’s a documentary about dwarfism. I learn the word achondroplasia. The average height of an adult dwarf is one hundred and thirty-two centimetres for men, one hundred and twenty-three for women. Voices and more voices. The night ticks on, and Frazer Melville breathes gently beside me. Thunder and wind outside. I fall asleep briefly and reawaken to catch the end of an arts programme. Everyone’s speaking in the same reasonable tone. There’s a discussion about new trends in Bollywood, with clips from classic and contemporary Indian movies. There is nothing on the three o’clock news: relieved, I am just drifting back to sleep with a sports quiz on in the background, when there’s a news flash.
I hoist myself up in bed. I try to do it gently, but my movement disturbs Frazer Melville, who sits up, his yawn as wide as a silent shout. And then listens. I turn up the volume and we take in the news like two parallel shock-absorbers. All through the five-minute broadcast, I feel oddly calm and in control. Something inside me refuses to shift. Perhaps I am in denial. I can still smell the chocolate on my skin.
When the news ends, Frazer Melville says, eloquently, ‘Oh no. Oh Christ. Oh fuck.’ Like him, I want to start up a litany of swearing, an anti-prayer. Or fall asleep again, pretend it’s a dream, start life again in the morning, properly, normally, and for real. But when you fall asleep a sceptic and wake to news that makes you a believer, the experience is as fundamental as having your whole skeleton replaced. You can’t ignore it. I feed a match to the lamp by the bed, a Moroccan cage of metal that sends angular shafts of candlelight flickering around the room. Outside, the storm has died away and the rain has become sporadic, undecided whether to stay or go.
‘Whoever we told, they’d never have believed us,’ I murmur. We have been lying here for some time. It is the only thought to cling to, under the circumstances. If I am being the rational one, what is Frazer Melville up to? His breathing is over-controlled. Perhaps he is fighting something. Tears? A heart attack? Men do that. They die in women’s beds from sex or shock. Or both.
‘Remember — we had this discussion yesterday,’ I say, raising myself clumsily on one elbow to make eye contact with him and assess his mood. ‘We had it several times. It was light-hearted, maybe. But we had it. We agreed that if we rang the Turkish embassy and told them they needed to evacuate a city of fifteen million people by the twenty-second of this month because a kid in a maximum security hospital had a vision—’
I can’t continue. My sudden burst of conviction, if that’s what it was, has evaporated as quickly as it arrived. I sink back down on the pillow. Frazer Melville doesn’t speak.
At half past three there’s an update. Reports about the extent of the damage are confused, but the quake, whose epicentre is in the Sea of Marmara, just outside the city, measured 7.7 on the Richter scale. It struck at fourteen minutes to one local time, and triggered a mini tsunami that swept south of the conurbation. First estimates say that about forty per cent of the city is affected. At least ten thousand buildings have been destroyed, among them the famous Blue Mosque. Skyscrapers and homes and office blocks and schools have collapsed. I imagine toy building blocks, and a pall of cement dust. It’s not yet dawn, so there’s almost zero visibility, and a high risk of aftershocks. First estimates say tens of thousands will be dead or injured and trapped. How many doctors, over the next few days, will be asking those saved from the wreckage whether they’re aware of any sensation below the waist? Or the neck?
I feel nothing. Then, just as I am beginning to wonder why I am not reacting, the top half of my body starts to sweat, and then shake. Tonight it is a nightmare. But soon it will officially be day. And real.
Frazer Melville and I have not been acquainted long enough to fathom each other’s behaviour in a crisis so when he turns his back on me, I do not take it personally. He needs space to think. But I wonder nonetheless what is going through his mind. Does he resent me for wanting to pick his brains at the charity event at the hotel, for dragging him into this? Do I resent him for not knowing what to do now, for not comforting me with the reassurance that it’s a coincidence, just like the hurricane? Together, we are alone. We cannot help each other, any more than we can help the people of Istanbul. Clumsily, I roll away from him and do battle with my thoughts.
At five he gets up silently and makes us both coffee. We barely speak. We drink it in bed, with the TV news on. Most of Istanbul is razed to the ground. At least three oil tankers have sunk. The Bosphorus is mayhem. Onshore, women wail amid the rubble, men storm about with spades. A baby screams hysterically, without seeming to draw breath. A thick eiderdown of dust covers the devastated city. Fires have broken out because of gas leaks. The images are beyond terrible. We watch, transfixed. Frazer Melville barely blinks.
On one comfortingly diminished plane of logic, I am thinking: coincidences happen. But another, more grandiose, legalistic counter-thought runs: Frazer Melville and Gabrielle Fox, because they had knowledge they did not disseminate, are responsible for manslaughter on a massive scale, and at worst are mass murderers by default. Their sins of omission have led to atrocity on the scale of any war crime.
We will go our separate ways. We are not a couple. We are two distinct and very different people on the verge of an abyss we could never have imagined. There’s no rule-book on how to behave in these circumstances. Frazer Melville leaves the house before me. Feeling foolish but defiant, I go online and donate a thousand pounds to Merlin, a small but apparently highly effective disaster relief charity which my father became involved with when he retired. But although the indirect supply of tents and doctors and pharmaceuticals to Turkey’s victims makes me feel better, it’s brief. Within minutes of logging off, the guilt has swamped me again.
At nine I leave for work as usual. Because I don’t know what else to do.
The heat has become so ferocious that venturing outside is an ordeal, something one must gear up to, armed with drinking water, sunglasses, cream, headgear. Items that were once optional accessories are now survival kit. Out on the street, the sky bears down like a low ceiling that will collapse at any moment under the pressure of the sun. It’s too hot for the gloves I normally use for the chair, so on the way to the car, my hands slip on the wheels. By the time I get to Oxsmith, I’m ready to smash something, which is ironic, given that my morning is taken up by two sessions of anger management, in which I must try to pass on advice and wisdom that I am catastrophically failing to heed myself. While I have seventeen teenagers all breathing in rhythm, and envisioning serene landscapes, positive energy, and blah blah, I am frantically plotting my next move. Which is a trip in the lift to my boss’s office, because saying nothing about Bethany’s prediction is no longer an option. I know Sheldon-Gray is going to take this badly, and already I am despising him for it.
No sweaty stuff today, no rowing machines, no towel-rubbing, no ungk and gah. Dr Sheldon-Gray is fully dressed, in a pink shirt and pink-and-grey tie. The smooth skin around his clipped goatee looks freshly exfoliated and moisturised. This level of care indicates he has meetings lined up. Real meetings, with real people.
I do not count. I realise I have drunk too much coffee. I’m jittery with caffeine.
‘So who’s the latest problem?’ demands my boss as soon as I appear in his line of vision. Since asking for Joy McConey’s notes and leaving the charity event early, I have fallen out of favour. I am now officially an annoyance. ‘I’ll take a bet on it being our little auto-asphyxiating Tourette’s friend, whats is name.’ He drums his fingers on the polished walnut of his desk.
‘No. In fact, I wanted to talk about the Istanbul earthquake.’
‘Terrible tragedy. Appalling. Yes. Hassan Ehmet has family nearby. He’s taking time off. No flights going there at the moment, but he’s managed to get one to Athens that’s leaving around now — drove up to Gatwick first thing, called me from there.’ Dr Ehmet, with his little ‘heh’ and his bad haircut and his PhD thesis waiting at the printer’s at Oxford University Press: how will he cope in the midst of a catastrophe on this scale? ‘He plans to drive across,’ Sheldon-Gray is saying. ‘Frankly, I doubt we’ll get him back. Turkey’s going to need all the trauma counsellors it can get. So we’ll be stretched here again, I’m afraid. What’s new, eh? Anyway, you wanted to say?’
‘Bethany Krall.’ His face tightens and clouds over. But before he can protest, I get straight to the point. When I explain that Bethany Krall apparently made an accurate prediction about the quake — as lightly as I can, which is not very, because I am actually scared and angry, and can’t be bothered to hide it — he starts rocking in his chair. When I mention Hurricane Stella — another ‘prediction’ — Sheldon-Gray twitches his head like a cow shaking off flies. I realise that he respects me some sixty per cent less for having raised the matter. Feels a forty per cent increase in contempt, even. I can’t blame him. Most of me feels the same. When I offer to explain in more detail, he declines in a way that brooks no argument. For a psychiatrist used to hiding his emotions, he is unusually transparent. Elaborately adjusting his cuffs, he takes a deep breath.
‘Gabrielle, I am shocked and disappointed and — yes, I’ll say it — appalled. I had thought more highly of you. Look. You can be sure Bethany told Hassan all this nonsense too. The difference is, he’s a scientist.’ But how has Dr Ehmet reacted? I wonder. What does Sheldon-Gray know about it, if Hassan’s on a plane? ‘History is repeating itself here, is it not?’ the man in pink continues loudly. His voice has a politician’s edge to it. There are times when you feel very alone in your body. This is one of those times. I would like to slide away and replace myself with a clone whose face doesn’t redden. ‘Let me tell you something you should know about your predecessor. We talked before about her notes, and why I removed them from the file. The fact is, they show that Joy McConey became disastrously involved in Bethany’s fantasies. She ended up convinced that her predictions were coming true. I’m sorry to tell you I’m having deja vu here. Joy McConey sat right where you are now and made claims about Bethany which clearly showed her to be unbalanced.’ I nod. ‘So perhaps you can understand that I am alarmed when you too begin to show signs of being gullible? Will you also be needing some time out?’ He spits out the cliché. like the hairball it is, and nudges at his mousepad.
‘But the earthquake — she predicted it to the day. That’s simply a fact. Hurricane Stella too.’
‘Gabrielle. Have you by any chance heard of the internationally renowed search engine Google?’
I guess it’s another rhetorical question so I don’t answer. I want to grab him by his pink tie and strangle him but he has somehow succeeded in knocking me back. ‘Let’s just type in ‘Istanbul earthquake predictions’, shall we, and then advance our search, as the technology permits us, to specify dates preceding the quake.’ He clicks ostentatiously. ‘And look what pops up. Aha. Aha. Yes, well. No surprises here, Gabrielle, or at least not to me. Just a quick glance at this screenful of information here is enough to tell me that young Bethany Krall may not be alone in having, er, foreseen this tragedy.’
I look. There are certainly plenty of listings. ‘An amateur geologist from Whitstable,’ murmurs Sheldon-Gray, now determined to enjoy himself. ‘A woman called Mitzi in Prague quoting the Book of Revelation: "There was a great earthquake and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair and the moon became as blood and every mountain and island were moved out of their places." We have entered the seven-year Tribulation, she says, when the raptured shall ascend to Heaven and the sinners burn in hellfire. Well, we’re all aware of Pentecostalism being the new European craze… here’s another one: someone in Utah who works with crystals, calling herself Daughter of the Planet,’ he reads. ‘Crystals are also very a la mode nowadays too, I understand, we mustn’t underestimate them, must we.’ He scrolls down. ‘I am sure that if we were to investigate Nostradamus, we would find a reference there too.’ I close my eyes and open them again. He is still there. ‘You’ve been in this business long enough to know the pitfalls, Gabrielle. We all find ourselves vulnerable around some of these very, er, intense young people. The professional thing is to recognise that vulnerability and take the appropriate steps to counter these, er, unhelpful impulses and reactions.’ Bibble babble, says Bethany in my head, and I squash a panic impulse to laugh aloud.
‘Are you saying I’ve mishandled Bethany’s case?’ I say, trying to keep my voice even. But I don’t manage it, and my boss’s shockingly blue eyes adjust themselves accordingly. Perhaps they are multi-functional, and he will now use them to X-ray the contents of my skull in search of proof that I have a screw loose.
‘Well, what do you think?’ he asks with a weary sigh. I don’t know his age, but suddenly he looks it. A man with a pension plan and a set of discreet escape routes. ‘Look,’ he says, gesturing at his screen. ‘You can see from this that the world is full of people like Bethany Krall. Our job is to free them of their fantasies, not collude in them.’ He smooths down his pink-and-grey tie and picks up the phone, indicating that our meeting is over, and begins to dial. I feel instantly uneasy. Who is he going to call, and what is he going to ask them?
‘And if we can’t manage that, Gabrielle,’ he says, almost as an afterthought, receiver cocked to his ear, ‘well. The fact is, if we can’t manage that, we do not have a job.’
When I drop in on Bethany later that day, it seems that she has heard about the earthquake, despite being in seclusion.
‘Jackpot, Wheels,’ she greets me. Her eyes are woozed, as though she’s seeing oncoming headlights, and welcoming them.
‘How do you know?’
‘It woke me up. I can still feel it,’ she says, pressing her palm to her almost breastless ribcage. ‘In here. And all over my skin. Now are you going to tell me I’m wrong?’
‘No. It happened.’
‘And are you going to tell me it’s a coincidence?’
Nothing in my training has prepared me for something like this. But it has taught me ‘solutions’ — what Bethany might call babble responses — to certain situations. Like now. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I’m going to tell you I think it’s a coincidence. So would Dr Ehmet, who has family in Istanbul.’
‘Of course he’ll say that. Because it’s the only thing he can say, because he didn’t listen to me when he should’ve.’ She lowers her head so it’s level with mine. ‘You’ve got to get me out of here,’ she whispers urgently. ‘Can’t you see that, you dumb cow?’
‘I can see that’s what you want, Bethany,’ I say. ‘But you’re in here for your own safety. And other people’s. You’re here to get well.’
‘You know that’s fucking bullshit,’ says Bethany. Her eyes are darker than usual. ‘I need to get out of here. This earthquake’s, like, nothing. There’s way worse coming. I can feel it, yeah. Seriously. It’s fuckingmega. On October the twelfth. The big one. I don’t want to die in here. I need to get out. You’ve got to help me.’
I feel phantom pins and needles in my legs. Anxiety. ‘What’s happening on October the twelfth?’
Bethany kicks at the floor with her scuffed black trainer. Her face is like the faint jazz of an oncoming storm. ‘It’s something new. No one’s seen it before. It starts in one place and it spreads everywhere. Too fast for anyone to do anything about it. Just help me get out of this place, Wheels. I don’t want to fucking drown. Not here.’
‘Is it a flood you’re talking about then? A flood in the UK?’
‘It’s more than that. But I don’t know what.’ Her eyes flicker warily and her voice becomes urgent. She seems scared. ‘It’s your job to help me, right? So help me.’
As I make my way to the lift, Frazer Melville calls.
‘What time do you finish work?’
‘Five-thirty.’
‘Can you come to my office at the university? Bring Bethany’s notebooks — all of them. Can you get here by six?’
When is an appropriate moment to tell a man that his existence weakens you? When is an appropriate time to admit that you can no longer control your heart? Not now. Not ever.
‘I’ll see you there,’ I tell him casually.
When carrying a body up two flights of stairs, there is only one convenient method, which is that favoured by firemen when they rescue people from burning buildings. Hence the ignominious position I find myself in now, slung over Frazer Melville’s broad shoulder like a sack, while he puffs his way doggedly up the steps, the bag containing Bethany’s notebooks — which I sneaked out of Oxsmith under my gel cushion — swinging off his other arm. If there was any residual coolness between us after this morning, the comedy implicit in this indignity has put an end to it. We stop on each landing, so that he can regain his breath and I can laugh — because it’s either that or cry, and when there’s a choice between humiliation and amusement, I know which response is best in buildings with no decent access. The university’s physics department is housed in an ancient block that is undergoing some kind of elaborate reconstruction involving multi-layered scaffolding and the removal of asbestos. As soon as I saw the entrance, I recognised it as unfriendly. Not to say actively hostile. ‘I’m sorry,’ Frazer Melville apologises again, still puffing. ‘I should have thought about it. It’s just that I keep forgetting you’re disabled.’
‘I’m not disabled.’ The words bump out with each step he takes. ‘And nor am I handicapped, or challenged, or differently abled, or a cripple. My legs don’t work. So I’m just paralysed, OK?’
‘OK, Mrs Paralysed,’ he pants. ‘Let’s get your non-working legs in here.’ And he bashes his way through a door.
He settles me on a beaten-up sofa, then straightens his back with a series of shucking movements while I look around. I’d imagined clean lines, a certain cerebral minimalism. Instead, there are desks cluttered with cables, computers, compass-like machines with multiple dials, walls plastered with contour maps, computer printouts. And all set in a miniature indoor jungle: tree-ferns, orchids, palms, succulents, and even climbers that tangle their feelers around desk-legs and lamp-stands. I think of my own suffering spider plant, Joy McConey’s legacy, and feel a stab of remorse. I can’t even look after a thing in a pot.
When Frazer Melville closes the door, another wall-space is revealed, on which are tacked three van Gogh prints, which I recognise at once as paintings from the most disturbed phase of the artist’s life, when he was living in Arles. There is Starry Night, the painting Frazer Melville showed Bethany at Oxsmith, writhing with weather and constellations and a fierce crescent moon. I remember he expected a reaction from her, some form of recognition, as though the mental disturbance she shared with van Gogh should make them kindred spirits. He was disappointed by her lack of interest. Below it is Road with Cypress and Star, which van Gogh painted before he left the asylum where he spent his last months. A towering tree forms the central image. There’s a road to the right, with two figures walking towards the viewer, and to the left a wheatfield under a sky in which hang both sun and moon. The third is Wheatfield with Crows, executed shortly before van Gogh’s suicide. Because of this, much has been made of the three roads offering different routes through a yellow field, and of the brooding sky, speckled with crows whose buckled forms are echoed by the menacing black clouds pressing down from above.
‘Right,’ I say, my eyes now accustomed to the sprawl Frazer Melville works in. ‘You’ve got me here. So now explain.’
He points at the wall next to the van Goghs, where there is a large graph dotted with tiny arrows. ‘It’s called the Kolmogorov Scaling Pattern. It’s a formula used by physicists to predict the speed and direction of particles in relation to other particles in a fluid. The kind of swirl you get when cream meets coffee, or smoke comes out of a chimney. There are even some economists who claim to see its patterns in the fluctuations on the foreign exchange markets. Now do you see the comparison between the Kolmogorov Scaling Pattern and the van Gogh skies? And between van Gogh’s skies and Bethany’s?’
‘Up to a point. But a swirl’s a swirl. Right?’
Apparently not. They have a structure, he tells me, a narrative: they map a complex dance of currents and counter-currents. And van Gogh had epilepsy.
‘How’s that a factor?’
‘Some years ago a Mexican physicist, Josi. Luis Aragbn, became interested in van Gogh’s skies. He analysed them mathematically.’ Frazer Melville is shoving a scientific paper at me. I read through the abstract, by Aragon et al.
We show that some impassioned van Gogh paintings display scaling properties similar to those observed in fluids, suggesting that these paintings reflect the fingerprint of turbulence with a realism consistent with the way that a mathematical model characterises this phenomenon. Specifically, we show that the probability distribution function (PDF) of luminance fluctuations of points (pixels) separated by a distance R is consistent with the Kolmogorov scaling theory in turbulent fluids. We also show that the most turbulent paintings of van Gogh coincide with periods of prolonged psychotic agitation of this artist.
‘These three were painted when he was suffering from frequent bouts of epilepsy,’ says Frazer Melville. ‘In this paper, Aragon shows how they actually map turbulence — invisible turbulence — with extreme accuracy. And he goes on to speculate that the delusions accompanying van Gogh’s epileptic fits might have given him a unique understanding of the physics of flow.’
‘And Bethany’s ECT—’
‘Those currents are giving her a grand-mal seizure. A similar experience to an epileptic fit. But it’s induced artificially and controlled, rather than arriving spontaneously through a brain malfunction.’
‘You mean there might be some kind of science to explain what she’s predicting?’
‘There has to be. At least, for what she’s claiming to feel. But as for how she can pinpoint the location and the date — I have no idea. I’m hoping there’s a clue in the notebooks.’
I fish them out of the bag and lay them on the desk. Taking the top one, he flips through the pages eagerly, but soon his expression shifts from interest to dismay. ‘Christ. It’s total chaos.’
‘What were you expecting — rational method? But there’s probably a pattern in there somewhere. If we can find it.’
‘How?’ he says, surveying a scrawled-over page despairingly.
‘If she writes on consecutive pages, there’d be a chronology to them.’
He continues to flick through. Some pages are chock-a-block with tiny, cramped notes, interrupted by sketches peppered with arrows. Others are devoted to freehand drawings, some of ordinary-looking clouds, others similar to the storm images Bethany made in the studio when she drew the Rio Christ. Ten or twelve pages of the most recent notebook — only a third full — are devoted to a series of what I think of as her ‘machinery-in-moonscape’ drawings. The style of these is more diagrammatic and observational, less emotionally charged than the others. There is a structure to them, an almost architectural formality that gives the impression of something that has been copied to scale, something that actually exists beyond Bethany’s imagination, and has its roots in reality. They make no sense to me but Frazer Melville seems struck by them. ‘Interesting,’ he murmurs, stroking a page as though it might contain hidden Braille. ‘No turbulence. Nothing at all, in terms of air-flow. I wonder what she’d do if I asked her to imagine it. What it would look like.’ The scenario is the same in all of them: a rubble-strewn stretch of land and a vertical line — sometimes thin, sometimes thick — descending from the sky to hit a flower-shaped cup or funnel at ground level, which continues underground and then curves, travelling horizontally and ending either in vagueness, or in a wedge shape, or in what appears to be an explosion. On the earth, around the funnel, Bethany has drawn broken rocks, or scree.
‘What does this represent?’ I asked her once.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. Edgily, as though I’d cornered her doing something shameful. ‘But I keep doing it.’
‘I’ll give you my psychologist’s take on these,’ I tell Frazer. ‘There’s no evidence I know of that she’s been sexually abused, and she hasn’t told me it happened. But I think it did. Or something like it. A violent invasion. Now you tell me your guess.’
‘I can’t. But I think they’re too technical to be symbolic. To me they look like some kind of mining operation.’
‘And what about these ones?’ I ask, leafing through to show him another Bethany motif: a collection of geometric-looking, five-sided forms packed together in a block. ‘A honeycomb? A multistorey car park? Stylised coffins?’
‘I’m going to run all this by my ex,’ says Frazer, sighing. ‘But she’ll probably say it’s hyessou.’
‘What’s hyessou?’
‘It’s Greek for a load of bollocks,’ he says miserably. ‘Knowing Melina, she’ll assume that my mother’s death has unhinged me.’
The routine we now embark on is meticulous. Methodically, for the next two hours, with little talking, we go through the notebooks page by eccentric page, numbering them as we go along, with Frazer Melville making photocopies and taking digital photographs which he transfers to his computer.
‘All done,’ he says finally, setting the last, incomplete book down on the desk. I pick it up and riffle through the pages. She has used different coloured pens for her drawings, but all the text is in scrawled black. Then I stop. The very last page is covered in handwriting.
‘Did you copy this?’ I ask Frazer Melville. He looks across, exhausted and puzzled. ‘It looks like a list.’
‘Let’s have a look,’ he says, pulling his chair up next to mine. It’s a set of dates, places and events. Some are written in black, and others in green, red or blue, as though there’s a kind of code to it. The first reads, February 11th. Volcanic disturbances, Mount Etna, Italy.
‘There was some activity back then,’ says Frazer Melville. ‘Before the big eruption in May. Though I’m not sure of the exact date. I could check it.’
‘She could have written it down afterwards,’ I say. ‘Look at the way she’s used different colours. This certainly wasn’t all written in one go. What’s next?’
‘February 4th cylone, Osaka, Japan,’ I read. The list goes on, through March and April: a tornado in southern Spain and new geyser in Iceland, a black cloud formation in Russia, a deadly methane belch from a lake in the Congo. One by one, as I read them out, Frazer Melville looks up the events on the net. In each case, they not only happened, but happened on the dates Bethany has noted in her red and black book. The eruption of Mount Etna on March 18th. An earthquake in Nepal and a typhoon in Taiwan on April 20th and 29th respectively. They too are there. May 21st. Rock falls in the Alps: we both remember that story in the news. A Swiss village was destroyed, because of permafrost thawing below the mountain slope, and unleashing its grip on the granite. Something churns inside me uneasily as I recall the footage.
‘No need to check out this one,’ murmurs Frazer Melville, pointing to the next entry. July 29th. Hurricane in the southern Atlantic. Rio de Janeiro. ‘Or the next.’
August 16th. Northern Pakistan and Kashmir. Earth tremors. ‘That rings a bell,’ says Frazer Melville. Googling it swiftly, he shoots me a confirming glance. My chest tightens.
‘Read me the rest.’
‘August 22nd. Istanbul. Earthquake.
‘September 5th. Bangladesh. Heavy rains, massive flooding.
‘September 13th. Mumbai. Cyclone.
‘September 20th. Hong Kong. Storms leading to fires.
‘October 4th. Volcano. Samoa.’
The next event is dated October 12th. It says, simply, Tribulation. There’s no indication of what this means, or how it will be triggered. Or where it will happen.
Frazer Melville doesn’t speak for a long time. ‘For the sake of argument, let’s say she did predict all these events accurately. Not just Rio and Istanbul, but all the previous ones. Which we can have no way of confirming. But let’s assume it.’
‘OK. Then what?’
‘Then such a high number of correct predictions — and note, not a single false one. You can’t call this coincidence. Or even lucky guessing.’
‘Which leaves us where?’
‘Looking for a scientific explanation.’ He breathes in deeply and exhales. ‘It’s quite a long shot, but it’s a hypothesis. In the absence of anything else…’
‘Go on,’ I say, urgently interested. Bethany’s list has unnerved me more than I’m prepared to admit.
‘None of these events happen out of the blue. The day the volcano erupts, or the hurricane hits, or the earthquake strikes, or the geyser appears, is the climax of a process that will have begun some time before. In some cases, years previously. We have to look at meteorology and geology quite differently, of course, in terms of timescale. Weather can be brewing for a week or more before it becomes violent, for example. Whereas the Istanbul quake has been on the cards for years, with the pressure building up along the faultline. So let’s hypothesise that Bethany is picking up otherwise undetectable signals — let’s call them vibrations — relating to events that are already on their way to happening. Let’s say that in each case, she’s sensing the beginning of a build-up of pressure, whether it’s atmospheric or underground. And then let’s hypothesise that she’s somehow been able to imagine very accurately the time it will take to develop into an event, and where it will manifest itself. She knows the globe pretty well, for someone of her age. But in any case I’d suggest it’s more about instinct than knowledge. It’s known that the pressure along the faultline that led to the Istanbul quake has been moving steadily east. But it’s basically a question of the deeper earth structures shifting along a timeline. And Bethany somehow picking up the pressure changes.’
‘Just instinctively?’
He shakes his head. ‘No. There has to be a reason. A physical connection between Bethany and these… phenomena. Perhaps a kind of magnetism, or even something sonar.’
‘Go on.’
‘There’s a kind of directional magnetism that enables birds to know which direction to fly in when they migrate. It’s well known that animals pick up a lot.’ I remember Dr Ehmet using a parallel with cats and dogs, to explain Bethany Krall’s need for ECT. ‘If there was an earth tremor fifty kilometres away, many species would sense it. Let’s imagine that in Bethany’s case, the ECT gives her extra sensitivity to energy fluctuations. Or just an awareness of when natural flows are disrupted enough to trigger some radical event.’
‘It feels quite far-fetched. But as a theory, I certainly prefer it to the notion that Bethany’s some kind of New Age eco-psychic. The question is, how far does it go? And what’s it for? And where does this biblical stuff about the Tribulation fit in?’
Frazer Melville shakes his head. My mind’s racing. Joy seemed to think Bethany’s father held a clue. If I went along to one of Leonard Krall’s sermons, might I get an insight into the genesis of her visions?
But first, there is a question I need to ask Frazer Melville, a question that has been nagging at me since the day he met Bethany. It’s delicate. Is now the time to ask it? Maybe we are not ready for personal confessions. But the particular circumstances demand a particular kind of honesty. Frazer Melville takes my hand and squeezes it. A tiny gesture of closeness that reassures me.
‘When do we start telling people?’
He says, ‘Not just when, but what. And who. And how. I mean, I announce to the renowned Dutch meteorologist Cees van Haven, in conjunction with no one, that Bangladesh is in for another flood. I can just hear him laughing. And that India is to expect another cyclone — hey. Unprecedented. And I e-mail Melina to tell her that Hong Kong will be hit by storms leading to fires. She’ll think I’ve gone nuts. Then I tell a Chinese vulcanologist colleague about an eruption in Samoa. Well, Samoa’s on the Pacific Rim, where there’s regular volcanic activity, so no surprises there either.’
‘The difference is that you give precise dates.’
‘And the dates come and go, and if Bethany’s right, they say it’s coincidence, and if she’s wrong, I’m stuck with egg on my face. And then just as I’m signing off I say, Oh, PS, the Tribulation, otherwise known to religious fanatics as seven years of hell on earth, preceded by a celestial airlift of the faithful known as the Rapture, is due on October the twelfth, but we don’t know what it is, let alone where it kicks off.’
‘No need for the PS. These are scientists. Leave God right out of it.’
‘OK then, scrub God, but mention that this vague but paradoxically cast-iron prediction of a natural disaster emanates from a child psychopath who murdered her own mum and has just stabbed a fellow-inmate in the bollocks with a piece of Scandinavia. But I can’t name her for privacy reasons.’
‘So leave that out of it too.’
He sighs. ‘With no scientific evidence to back it up… Look what happened to Joy McConey.’ He’s doing something origami-like with his notes.
‘Are you talking yourself out of this?’
He stops and smiles. The green fish in his eye ignites. ‘No, my little sex goddess on wheels. This is my way of talking myself in.’
We sit for a moment in silence.
‘When you met Bethany, and I left her alone with you in my office, she said something to you,’ I begin. ‘Something that made you miserable.’
My remark has an effect more dramatic than anything I could have envisioned. Frazer Melville has leaped to his feet, and suddenly he’s offering me coffee, politely, as though we don’t know each other, as though we have not been here for two hours, as though we have never made love. ‘It’s no trouble to make some,’ he says, pointing at a toxic-looking percolator in the corner.
‘I seem to have hit a nerve,’ I say calmly. ‘Come back and sit.’
‘It was nothing,’ he says, returning reluctantly to his chair. But he shifts it slightly away from me as he does so, widening the space between us.
‘That’s not my feeling. My feeling is she said something you’d rather not face or discuss. But maybe you need to.’ He looks at his spread hands. I am getting closer now, and he’d rather I wasn’t.
‘One day after she’d had ECT, Bethany touched my wrist, like she was feeling my pulse,’ I tell him. ‘And then she said things about me — about my car accident — that I can’t understand her knowing. That I can’t explain away.’ There. I have raised it.
‘No need to tell me,’ he says quickly. ‘If it’s painful.’ So someone died. You had two hearts and one was gone. But you never found out how the two of you would be together.
‘Yes, it is. And also very private.’
I look at the splotch of green in Frazer Melville’s left iris. A tiny tropical fish that has gatecrashed his eye. It makes me long for him.
‘Gabrielle, I would never ask you about anything you’d rather not discuss. I hope you’ll trust me with that. We have plenty of time.’
‘I know. But the reason I mention it is because I think she did something similar with you: that’s my guess. Am I right? That she knew something personal?’
He nods miserably and looks at me in an unfathomable way, his eyes glassy from — what? Is it fear, confusion, guilt? Or something else?
‘You don’t have to tell me what it was,’ I say quickly. ‘But I want to establish — she unsettled you, didn’t she, by coming out with some personal information.’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘She did.’
I wait for more. I am patient that way.
‘But it wasn’t about me,’ he mumbles. ‘It was about… another person. Someone I care about a lot. Who I wouldn’t want to hurt for the world.’
Despite my belief that it’s absurd to be jealous of someone’s past, I redden. Frazer Melville hasn’t told me a great deal about Melina. I know that when she left him for Agnesca, they didn’t speak for two years. I also know that later on, when he was working on a paper about marine landslides, and wanted her opinion as a geologist, he contacted her professionally, and they began an e-mail correspondence which has continued, sporadically, ever since. He speaks of her healthily, in the same affectionate way one speaks of a social misstep one has long since forgiven oneself.
‘Don’t tell me any more if you’d rather not,’ I say, taking his hand. ‘It’s just Bethany’s way of feeling powerful. I know how her mind works.’ We sit in silence for a moment, but then my curiosity — no, my jealousy — gets the better of me. ‘Was it something about you and Melina?’
He looks troubled. ‘No, it wasn’t.’
‘Oh.’ I am more relieved than I should be. And then puzzled. If not Melina, then who?
‘I don’t know how to say this.’ I sense exhaustion. Or something beyond it, in another dimension. ‘Gabrielle. Can’t you guess? It was about you.’ Suddenly I can’t find any words. And something’s lodged in my throat so I can’t tell him to stop, to shut up. Which I want and need him to. Now. Very urgently. ‘Gabrielle. I’m sorry. Bethany told me that when you had the accident, you were…’ He stops. He’s looking at me in a way that glitters. It’s agonising. For a light moment, I feel nothing except a swelling in my throat. ‘I’m sorry. You put me in such a difficult — Oh darling.’
A fleeting, almost hallucinatory relief. Then more pain, an exquisitely precise movement inside my ribcage, like the tightening of a ratchet.
I say, ‘Oh.’ And then my mouth shuts and I know it won’t open again, so there’s no point trying. When something has been said, even if the words are spoken silently, it can’t be unsaid.
‘Gabrielle? Are you OK?’
I nod. He takes both my hands. I know he’s looking at my eyes but I can’t meet his. I look at our hands instead — his freckled, mine olive — and remember my first meeting with Bethany. Something she said drifts up. Did you know that blood has its own memory? It’s like rock, and water, and air.
‘Is it true?’ he asks, finally. With effort, I shift my gaze to the wall. There’s a brown splotch on it. The shape is reminiscent of France or Spain. I wonder how it got there. Perhaps someone threw a cup of coffee. Decaf. Or perhaps tea. If there was sugar in it, there might be tiny crystals, clinging on. ‘Sweetheart. Speak to me.’
But I still can’t look at him. I stare at the French I Spanish splotch, wondering about the sugar, imagining the crystals, until its edges blur. He stands up. He lifts me out of the chair. He holds me to his chest, squeezing me. I can feel his heart banging, a steady hard hurting thump. My legs dangle like a puppet’s. Then he sits in his chair and takes me on to his lap, his arms straitjacketing me. There’s clearly no escape, either from him or from myself, so I lean my head back. His body is hot, comforting. I feel a weird kind of shame creep over me, like a sick desire.
‘She had no right to tell you.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
We don’t speak for a moment. Outside, a car alarm sets up. Around it, you can sense the night’s dark yawn, the brush of birds’ wings against hot pine needles, the delicate exhalations of tarmac.
I say, ‘I was going to call him Max.’
‘HOW—’
‘Twenty-eight weeks. They can be born alive at that stage. But he wasn’t.’
If I allow myself to cry, I will never stop.
So I don’t, and we sit like that for a while, I don’t know how long, and then he carries me down the stairs and drives us back to my home through the warm night, windows open to the hot, scent-laden air. In his arms, in bed, I give in to it. Frazer Melville knows there’s nothing to say, so he doesn’t try. But he holds me all night. And that is something.
In the morning we watch the news. The pall of dust is clearing to reveal a choked wasteland, desolate as a hundred thousand Ground Zeros, dwarfing anything I have seen or could have imagined, a smoking, smouldering bleakness that stretches for kilometre upon kilometre, with odd pockets of normality on which the sun shines: a playing field, a rind of park, a sparkling lake sprinkled with painted pedalos. Mosques, their domes popped open like puffballs, gape up at the sky. Thousands of people are entombed in rubble. Soldiers in masks search for survivors, picking their way through jagged promontories of reinforced cement with heat detectors and sniffer dogs.
I wonder what goes through Bethany Krall’s mind when she watches the aftermath of a horror she so clinically predicted. Does she feel powerful, proud, omniscient, invincible? Or in a corner of her psyche, is she scared out of her wits? And Dr Ehmet, scouring name-lists, tent encampments, home-made posters and Red Cross centres for his family, one of millions? I do not imagine this man, with his bad haircut and his brave ‘heh’ and his Hegel quotations, being well equipped for the task he has set himself, but he will do it anyway. And his broken heart will join all the other hearts smashed in seconds, for no reason that makes any sense to anyone.
In a few days, there will be stories of freak survivals. A child will crawl unscathed from an impossibly narrow fissure in the ground. An old lady will recount the tale of a jar of mulberry jam which saved her life when she lay with her broken legs trapped under a beam. Then fast-forward to the time, not so far from now, when the bereaved have trudged away with the objects they hold dear — a photograph, a toy, a cactus, a teapot, a copy of the Koran — leaving the husk of Istanbul to stand and then fall: a ghost city, a modern Angkor Wat. Before long, nature will stake its claim. Insects, pigeons, squirrels, lizards, snakes and blown sand will overtake the ruins of flats and travel agents’ offices and schools and department stores. Morning glory, cyclamen and all shades of bougainvillaea will writhe their way through the remains of tower blocks and climb up the rusted steel reinforcements of hospitals to bloom in bright carpets; poppies and bindweed and rosemary and lemongrass will deck splintered wood and smashed concrete with verdure; acacia trees and chinaberries will colonise the cracks, splitting tarmac to conjure the worst kind of beauty: the kind that celebrates human collapse.
When something has been tortured it can never be itself again. Be it a spine or a heart. Nerve-endings and longings have died, impulses have changed, sensitivities have found new routes of expression, specific muscle movements and emotional urges have calcified. So although I am beginning to diagnose in myself the rapid growth of a mental symptom, triggered by my recent closeness to the freckled physicist, I do not succumb to the comforts it could offer me. I recognise it for what it is: a false sensation. Like the neurological swarming in my legs, this symptom — some would call it love — is phantom evidence of an emotional indulgence my circumstances deny me.
In my lunch break I surf the net, following links and refining searches, backtracking and lateral-jumping, switching trains of thought on the lightest whim. I skim stories about the Planetarians’ latest call to indict the American ex-president for ‘Earth crimes’. About the Siberian tundra defrosting faster than even the most pessimistic models have predicted, about the outer edges of the Amazon basin being reduced to giant puddles of mud, full of choking fish, about how one day soon, the remaining forest will burn and become savannah: one lung gone. About the Gulf Stream absorbing the huge Arctic melt, slowing down, bringing less heat to the Atlantic, and playing havoc with shorelines. ‘If the warming process cannot be reversed in time, then the near-extinction of the human race is inevitable in the long-term,’ wrote Modak in his Washington Post article. But when Bethany refers to ‘the Tribulation’, the cataclysm she cannot name, is she simply speaking of the climatological point of no return, the tipping point that Modak believes has already passed — or some other, unidentified catastrophe?
How can you prevent something you can’t even name?
I click and click, and end up nowhere.
Feniton Acres is one of the eco-towns that sprung up before the housing crisis. I arrive there later than I had planned, sometime after six. The destination I have programmed into my satnav is part of a mall with a central car park. There is a jacuzzi franchise, a fishing-gear supplier, a vet’s, a cinema, a few upmarket clothes stores sporting mannequins in discreet leisurewear. Behind it all, there’s a golf course. The church itself, vast and pink, is low-slung, with a crab-like shell and a Scandinavian architecture-kit feel: a militantly uncombative building in a manufactured community. Amid the carefully spaced rowan trees and Japanese maple, I note with amusement that here, at least, the halt and the lame are welcome: In addition to several disabled parking bays, there is wheelchair access in the form of a cement ramp leading up to the main entrance.
Like many people concerned with the impression they make, I tend to hesitate in doorways — a bad habit which has worsened since my accident. But here, I do not have the luxury of preparing myself. The entrance is of the hospital or hypermarket variety, with sensored glass doors that slide open automatically. It must be well soundproofed because wheeling my way in, I’m hit by an unexpected boom of music. A disco-like hymn is underway. A rush of conditioned air brings an instant chill and gooseflesh to my bare arms. Inside there is a sea of people swaying to the music. They radiate happiness.
A few heads turn and I’m smiled at encouragingly. Among the five hundred or so worshippers, there’s a high proportion of black and brown skin in relation to white — much more than you would expect from Feniton Acres’s demographic. The hall is a giant carpeted space in a neutral, pale blue. Near the front, beneath a cement cross that rises in bas-relief from the whitewashed wall, there’s a band with guitars, some timpani, wind instruments and percussion, all played by men, apart from the saxophone, which is wielded by a teenaged girl in jeans. A few more smiles of welcome as I am ushered by a smart-suited young man to a space near the front of the hall, by an aisle, with a view of the action. He hands me a white envelope and a pen and whispers, ‘This is for your tithe. We all give what we can.’ On the front of the envelope are boxes to fill in, with name, address and credit-card information.
Near me a young woman is facing the congregation and swaying to the music using elegant arm and hand movements which look vaguely familiar. Several members of the audience, none of whom are singing, watch her intently. Then it dawns on me: they are deaf, and she is translating the hymn into sign-language. Though why she might need to I am not sure, as the words appear on a huge screen at the back of the hall in blue letters.
I’m going to stand right up and let Jesus in
And heal my soul from mortal sin
I’m going to pray to him each and every hour
Because the way is his and so is the power.
In front of me, a woman’s blocky body sways to the rhythm.
And then I see him.
In real life Leonard Krall is bulkier, more imposing and somehow more vital — more human — than the suave man in the photos on his website. He’s wearing a dove-grey suit, very well-cut, and has a microphone hooked over one ear. He doesn’t look like someone whose wife has been stabbed to death with a screwdriver and whose daughter is possessed by Satan. Catching my eye briefly and giving a nod, he rocks his whole body as he sings. A happy man, you’d say. A man who knows who he is and why he is here. A man in his element.
Unsure of the tune, when the chorus starts up again, I mouth the words. Around me, people are exchanging delighted, almost conspiratorial glances, as though they are all in on the same big secret. And perhaps they are. I think: the mass production of serotonin. Religion is the opiate of the people. Then, as the pulse of energy amplifies around me, another phrase floats into my head, a phrase from somewhere else, somewhere contradictory: if the spirit moves you. I feel a big foolish smile blooming on my face. Acceptance: accept, and you will be accepted. I’m being caught up in it. You can’t not be. A man next to me has flung his head back. While the others sing, he has his hands clasped in prayer, and is offering up a fast unbroken babble of words, as though experimenting with the possibilities of his tongue. I envy his freedom. I shut my eyes and sway to the music. With movement denied to my lower half, my upper body craves it. I lift my arms and wave them from side to side as I sing, following the words scrolling across the big screen above the choir. Tears come to my eyes in a Pavlovian reflex. I can’t help it. Group singing is like good sex. After the climax, you’re exhilarated but winded. I could do this for ever. We sing four more hymns, ending with ‘Stand up, stand up for Jesus’ — the only one I am familiar with. I am almost disappointed when it’s over and the congregation finally sits. Leonard Krall, bulky and energetic, begins pacing the front of the hall.
‘Those supermarket loyalty cards. Hands up who doesn’t have one?’ A ripple of laughter. ‘Well, I don’t know about you but most of the time I don’t give mine a second thought, except when it’s time to claim the discounts. But last time when the cashier was swiping my card through the machine I started to wonder about the word loyalty, and about the real transaction that’s going on here. As in, who’s being loyal to who — and why?’ He pauses, and as the nods kick in, he moves on to ‘the wider meaning of loyalty in our globalised society’. What kind of loyalty is important: loyalty to a retail provider, or a football team, or to our tribe (he indicates quotation marks), or to all of God’s children, whether or not they speak our language and even share our creed? Is it loyalty to a set of Christian principles? He thinks it is. You can see Bethany in him, in the upper part of the face, in the spacing of the eyes. There’s a potency. You could find him attractive. ‘War, famine, disease, catastrophes. The spread of atheism, climate change, the violence in Jerusalem and Iran. You watch. The political world is going to be shaken and shaken. Yet once more I shake not the earth only but also Heaven, Hebrews chapter twelve, verse twenty-six, and verse twenty-seven: the things that cannot be shaken will remain. We will remain. Here, steadfast in the Lord. For we can’t be shaken, right? But others can.’ He raises his voice warningly. ‘There is an epidemic of false religion in our world today. Our nation and our capital must turn back to God, the God of today, the God of now!’ He is shouting. ‘May we be drenched in your grace, 0 Lord! Drench us, drench us in your eternal love!’ Then he softens. ‘Glory be.’
The woman next to me agrees emphatically, joining the chorus of murmurs and Amens. ‘There’s no doubt in my mind that evil forces are at work on Planet Earth. That the Devil is gearing up for something. Well, here’s God’s message: the followers of Christ are gearing up for something too!’ He stabs the air with his finger, prompting more murmurs and staccato claps of approval from the audience. ‘We’re gearing up for the Rapture!’ Cheers break out, and he’s pacing the hall like a panther, making flashes of eye contact. ‘There are signs. I see signs and I feel signs. Signs the Bible has spoken of. What did we all feel when we saw Christ come tumbling down the mountainside? Have you really chosen this hour, Lord, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, to rapture us and visit this planet with Ezekiel’s War?’ Not waiting for an answer, he thumps the air. ‘It is written, people! It is written! Behold, the Lord maketh the earth empty, and maketh it waste, and turneth it upside down, and scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof. Therefore bath the curse devoured the earth, and they that dwell therein are desolate: therefore the inhabitants of the earth are burned, and few men left. God is presenting a challenge to us terrestrial beings. But don’t expect everyone to understand his ways. John chapter three: you must be born again to see the kingdom of the Lord.’
Amen, comes the fervent murmur.
The home life of the Krall family. I want to ask questions. Did Bethany and her parents sit on a leather sofa together and watch inspirational DVDs? Did Karen Krall ensure her daughter consumed five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, as recommended by the Department of Health? Did Bethany come regularly to this church, and listen to Leonard’s gospel? What role does forgiveness play when your daughter leaves a screwdriver sticking out of your wife’s eye?
‘When Istanbul was razed to the ground,’ Krall is saying, ‘it confirmed a deep knowledge — a knowledge borne on the Faith Wave that we are part of — that the End Times are approaching. People, we have nothing to fear. Fear is the Devil’s weapon against us and we shall not allow him to prevail. We know we are safe and that the Lord will protect us. But what of our loved ones, and all those who are not saved, who have not found God’s love?’
There’s a murmur of assent in the audience. I learned at school, among the nuns, never to underestimate the sheer force of belief. The unshakeability of true faith. Leonard Krall has it.
‘We have been chosen to live through these times and to interpret these times,’ he is saying. ‘So we will stand up to that Devil who is destroying this Earth that God made, and spreading atheism across the globe, and we shall await the return of the Messiah, the great Redeemer. For just as we saw him fall, so shall he rise!’ Still pacing the floor energetically, he has slipped seamlessly into song mode: a chord of music erupts from the keyboard in accompaniment.
‘So shall he rise, so shall he rise, so shall he rise, rise, rise!’
He lifts his hands and people get to their feet and sing about the risen one, the chosen one, the holy one. I clap along in rhythm. Again, that physiological response: my heart lifts and a smile blooms and I am enjoying myself. At the end of the song the congregation remains standing, which means my view is blocked. I shift further into the aisle. Krall’s head is now bowed and his fist is in the air, revealing a dark-haired wrist, a silver watch, a white cuff. His energy is intimate, almost sexual. His eyes are closed and his body shivers, indicating a mood shift. When he speaks again, tipping his head back in an almost languid gesture, it is with quiet force.
‘We shall be among the saved, and we do our best to turn the hearts of all those we know and love who have not yet found His grace towards God so that they too shall be saved. Psalms chapter twenty-five, verse four: Show me thy ways, 0 Lord, teach me thy paths. We don’t want anyone to suffer on this Earth during the End Times. Some of them are our friends, our loved ones. We take no joy in their circumstances. We want them to repent their sins and rise and be raptured alongside the righteous, and rejoice in the return of the Messiah. And he shall come for us, oh yes, make no mistake he shall come.’
Assent ripples across the hall.
After the service, I roll my way past the clusters of men and women and teenagers clad in the uniform of high-street fashion chatting energetically, flush-faced, while the younger kids run out to the mall.
‘Welcome,’ says Krall, pulling up a chair, getting down to my level and shaking my hand with the confident grip of a people person, a gifted speaker who can also listen. ‘It’s great to see new faces. Are you local? Leonard Krall.’ He’s still holding my hand and I begin to wonder when he will release it. ‘People call me Len. Pleased to meet you.’
‘I’m Penny,’ I lie.
‘Penny,’ he repeats. Another squeeze, and I get my hand back. I came up with Penny — an insecure, religious version of my pre-accident self — on the journey here. ‘I’m just passing through. I was driving past and I heard the music, so…’
‘You couldn’t resist. Those old favourites, yeah?’
‘Comfort singing.’
He chuckles. ‘Better than comfort eating, right?’
‘What you said about the Tribulation and the Rapture struck a chord.’ This earns me some intensive eye contact and a nod, but no more. It’s unnerving to see Bethany’s brown eyes shining out intelligently and softly from another face.
‘You know something, Penny? I can feel Jesus in you.’
I don’t quite know how to respond to this, except with paranoia. Has he spotted I’m a fake?
‘Can I have a word with you, when you’ve said your goodbyes? The fact is, it wasn’t just the music that brought me here,’ I confess. I have tweaked his interest.
‘Sure thing, Penny.’ He straightens up, ready for the task. ‘Give me ten minutes,’ he says, winking at a man walking past. ‘Clear this righteous mob out of here and we can chat in private.’
I wait as he presses more flesh, jokes with more men, listens to more women, mock-punches little kids. There’s a barbecue atmosphere.
Fifteen minutes later we are alone. ‘So, Penny. Talk to me.’
‘The Tribulation. Does it have phases?’
He shakes his head. ‘Well, you’re right in there with the big questions, aren’t you? Phases, yes. In fact some Christians believe it’s started already. Look around you. Plagues, extreme weather, disasters, globalisation, stock markets collapsing, terrorism, atheism. You could call them symptoms.’
‘So do you believe it’s started?’
‘On bad days I do. But a close reading of the scriptures indicates that true believers will be saved before it begins.’
‘In the Rapture. They’ll be caught up in the air.’
‘So the Bible tells us.’
‘You mentioned the Antichrist. So I take it you believe in evil?’
He laughs. ‘Too right I do. If you take God seriously, you have to take the bad guy the same way. But above all, I believe in good. I believe in the power of God’s will and God’s plan first and foremost. Even though terrible things happen. And God seems to let them happen. That confuses people, but it shouldn’t. We’re always asking ourselves what I call the why question. Lord, why hast thou forsaken me? But God knows what he’s doing. He has a plan. It’s just, we’re like ants, Penny. We’re too small to see his plan. Our vision doesn’t reach that far. Our problem is arrogance. We need to do away with arrogance. It takes humility to accept that God has it all mapped out, but that we can’t always know it. Things that don’t make sense to us make sense to Him. Like I said earlier, we see through a glass darkly.’ A shadow crosses his face, but disappears immediately. He grins. ‘Sorry, Penny. Me, banging on.’ ‘But can evil be innate? I mean, this idea of innocence, and corruption… Can a child be naturally evil?’
‘She can be visited by the Devil.’
‘She,’ I say. There is a tiny silence. Leonard Krall stiffens imperceptibly and his gaze withdraws inward.
‘The Devil is powerful,’ he murmurs finally, almost to himself, and for the first time there is a hint of sorrow in his features, the sorrow of a man who has lost his wife and child. ‘The Devil is cunning. The Devil is malevolent and he finds ways of bringing the righteous off the path of good.’ He looks at me intensely, as though searching for the Jesus that he sensed earlier. ‘What do you think of that, Penny?’
‘The church I belong to doesn’t — well. They’re all in favour of good. But evil doesn’t seem to exist. And I keep thinking, can you really have the one without the other?’
‘Political correctness?’ His smile is encouraging, complicit. ‘I’m not going to start knocking other churches or beliefs,’ he says. ‘But I’m a Bible man. And if you’re a Bible man, you believe what’s in the scriptures, and you don’t edit out the Devil just because you don’t like the idea of evil. Trust the text. Evil’s among us. But our faith will deliver us from it. Faith is evidence of things not seen. Hebrews eleven. I like that one. Evidence of things not seen.’ Then he reaches in his pocket and hands me his card. It bears his name, with an e-mail address, and a mobile phone number. ‘Take this, Penny,’ he says. ‘In case you’d like a longer chat. I move about a lot, spreading the word, but you’re very welcome wherever I’m preaching.’ The combination of his sincerity and my fraudulence brings on a deep blush. I take his card and thank him. With no pocket to put it in, and not wanting to stuff it down the side of my chair, I fumble in my handbag for my wallet, which I promptly drop. Gallantly, he picks it up. And then, less gallantly, and to my shock, he flips it open. My driver’s licence stares at us both.
And in a split second, everything has changed. ‘Gabrielle Fox,’ he reads aloud. The blood drains from my face. ‘It’s a pity it doesn’t give your profession on here, Ms Fox.’ I want to be sick. ‘But I would guess journalist.’
‘I’m not a journalist,’ I mumble. ‘Please give me my wallet back.’
With a quick head-move, his smile has vanished. ‘They still come sniffing around every once in a while. But none of them’s sunk this low before,’ he says, indicating my wheelchair. ‘Penny.’
‘I’m paralysed.’
‘And I’m Mickey Mouse. Look, Ms Fox. Most people here know that I suffered a personal tragedy a couple of years back, and that the church and God’s love have helped me get to a place where I can count my blessings. I don’t bother with the why question any more. I accept that we see things only as through a glass darkly. Now I don’t want to offend you. But I don’t like subterfuge. So if a young woman who has clearly suffered in life comes to me seeking counsel over a genuine spiritual concern about the nature of evil, I am happy to help her. But if someone cold-bloodedly gets hold of a wheelchair and cheats her way into God’s house to ask me personal questions about a private tragedy concerning my family, that’s another matter. I would have to respectfully ask her to leave.’
I feel mildly unwell. I would like to teleport myself out of here. Rewind the scene to the bit where we’re singing and clapping and I’m enjoying myself. Anything to get out of this — this this.
‘I have nothing to say to you.’ His face is white. ‘Except, who the hell are you?’ I was not expecting sudden rage on this scale and it scares me. For a stomach-turning moment I think he’s going to hit me. I reach for my thunder egg and I’m ready to swing it at him. But before I can, he has manoeuvred his way behind me and snatched the handles of my chair. I grab the wheels to block them but when he gives a blunt shove, my hands aren’t strong enough to resist. He is wheeling me out. The automatic doors open. Dusk is gathering. Without a word he pushes my wheelchair — faster than it has ever been pushed — down the ramp.
‘We Bible men are fond of miracles, Ms Fox,’ he says. He’s beginning to tip my chair forward. I cling on to my wheels. I want to scream but nothing comes out. I look around wildly for someone to help me, but the car park is a deserted prairie. ‘And I like to think they sometimes happen.’ He’s still rocking me. I grab on to the arm-rests with all my force, but he doesn’t stop. He’s strong. He’s tipped the chair so far down that I’m staring at the tarmac and losing my grip. I’ll have to let go if I want to avoid serious injury. ‘So let’s see if we can make the lame walk, eh?’
I am too dumbstruck to speak. I need to stay in the chair but I’m losing the fight. Desperate to protect myself, I let go just in time to break my fall with my hands. I’m sprawled on the ground. I may have knocked one of my legs, and there’s a searing pain in my left palm. I glance at it and see blood and gravel and chopped-up skin. Pain versus pride: I’m struggling not to sob. And losing.
He laughs. ‘Nice acting.’ Then he flings my wallet down and its contents spill on the gravel. My driver’s licence stares up at me.
‘I’m your daughter’s therapist,’ I blurt, my eyes stinging from the pain. ‘She’s been foreseeing natural disasters. She predicted Istanbul.’ His body stiffens. He doesn’t speak, but I can feel him registering what I’ve said. ‘Can you explain that, Mr Krall?’
‘Oh, I can explain it all right,’ he says. A shudder runs across his features. Fear, or contempt, or both? ‘Or rather the Devil can. It’s him you should be talking to. He’s the one in charge of Bethany.’
‘She’s your daughter.’
‘Not any more. I pray for her soul every day of my waking life. You’re being manipulated, Ms Fox. And you can’t even see it.’
By the time I’ve recovered enough to move, he’s gone. As I drag myself back up into my wheelchair, he has returned to his church and closed the door and I am alone.
Swallowing my tears and trying to think of ways I can make the incident sound amusing rather than grotesque, I call Frazer Melville from the car, but get no answer. I turn on the radio. In Turkey, there are stories of last-ditch rescues, poignant reunions, tragic miscalculations, the spread of disease, the bungling of aid. I drive, trying not to think.
Frazer Melville is waiting for me at home, with a bottle of champagne and a thin unhappy smile. ‘To celebrate the end of my career as a credible scientist,’ he announces. We clink glasses and he sets about cleaning up my scraped hand. In our different ways, we are in despair.
‘You sent the e-mails?’
‘I’ve concentrated on the next four incidents, since the first three have already happened and we can’t make sense of the last entry. I presented them as speculations made by someone who has accurately predicted natural disasters in the past. I kept it neutral, and asked for statistical likelihoods of the events happening on the date given, and I sent some of Bethany’s Moonscape with Machinery drawings to Melina. She has an ex-colleague with connections to Harish Modak.’
I tell him I am proud of him. But I can see that the pressing of the ‘send’ button has renewed his turmoil. ‘And you’re sure that all these people are open to… ideas that you can’t prove?’
‘Can’t be sure in all cases. Melina’s not that way inclined, but I’m guessing she’ll pay me the compliment of replying seriously, and not use it against me. Harish Modak — if Melina’s contact passes it on — is someone who just might take a chance. Out of pure curiosity. He’s maverick enough.’
‘I’ve read one of his articles. I was impressed. Though I wanted to shoot the messenger.’
‘He’s Lovelock’s spiritual successor in some ways. In others not. He doesn’t really give a toss what the rest of science thinks of him. But he has huge influence.’
‘So what now?’
‘We consume more alcohol and you tell me about Leonard Krall.’
The next morning my boss gets straight to the point. He has received a phone call from Bethany’s father. A phone call of ‘justified complaint’. There’s nothing to say, so I don’t. ‘Can you deny it?’
‘He tipped me out of my wheelchair.’ It’s as weak as it sounds.
‘Yes. So he told me. He apologises for that. Nonetheless. It doesn’t exactly cancel out what you did, now does it?’
‘Did he ask after Bethany?’
‘No. She murdered his wife, he has a right to keep his distance. Anyway this isn’t about Bethany, it’s about you. You!’ He stands up and bangs his fist on the desk. Instinctively, I flinch. But he doesn’t care. ‘Jesus, Gabrielle. What the hell were you thinking of?’ Then he sits down abruptly and slaps his hand on the desk again.
I smooth my skirt. ‘I was curious,’ I tell him quietly. That’s the closest I can get to the truth. A fuller answer — that I was hoping to find a clue to the daughter’s visions in the father’s religious beliefs — will damn me further. Not because I wanted answers to my questions, but because of the way I went about getting them. ‘Is curiosity about one’s patients a crime?’
‘You were curious,’ he repeats, quietly. ‘Curious.’ He exhales an infuriated sigh. ‘Well, I too am curious, Gabrielle. And being curious — about you, in this case — I naturally made a call to London, and spoke to your previous employers in Hammersmith. And learned that Dr Omar Sulieman, who gave you such a glowing reference when you applied for this posting, has sadly died. So we were unable to have the conversation I would have liked. But I spoke to his successor, Dr Wyndham. Who hadn’t known you, but looked you up in the file, at my request.’ I take in a breath, but don’t speak. There’s no point. A seagull settles on the windowsill, tilts its head to observe us for a second, then takes off in a white whirr. ‘ It seems from the records that all the other members of the Assessment Committee opposed your reinstatement at the Unit, on the grounds that you weren’t ready to go back to work in the wake of your accident and bereavement. Psychologically, they claim, you were unready to meet the challenges of resuming such a demanding career, and recommended that you take another six months’ sick leave. Dr Sulieman, however, overrode that decision when he supported your application for the temporary post here at Oxsmith.’
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.
‘Internet paranoiacs. Eco-fanatics. Psychics. People on the distant margins. The kind of people you give a wide berth to. The kind of people Sheldon-Gray Googled for you. Freaks in Prague and mystics in Yucatan. Apocalypse dot fucking com. Forget it.’
I secretly agree with him but cannot allow pessimism to prevail. We part on bad terms. He has lost what looks like five kilos in two weeks, and doesn’t look well on it. I am supposed to have an understanding of the human psyche. But today I do not.
The next morning when I arrive at work I’m informed at Reception that Dr Sheldon-Gray wants to see me immediately to discuss an ‘incident’ involving Bethany Krall. When I get there I discover that today his pomposity is formal, statesmanlike, as though the next step in his career involves a UN candidature. He is afraid there is bad news. Bethany is in casualty at St Swithin’s hospital. She is ‘not doing too well’.
‘What happened?’
‘Electrocution. She got hold of a metal fork and stuck it in a socket. Passed out, of course. Burns all over her hands and up her arms. Miracle she’s not dead. Rubber soles. Oh, and before all that she shaved her head.’
‘Totally?’
‘It seemed ritualistic. They’re keeping her in hospital.’ Something’s up. I can feel it in the air. He has a plan.
‘So what now?’ I’m wondering how best to play this.
He places his hands on the desk, spreads out his fingers, and eyes me defiantly. ‘I’m having her transferred to Kiddup Manor.’ Kiddup Manor: modern psychiatry’s Death Row.
In the silence that follows he lifts his hands from the desk and places them in an attitude of prayer, the middle fingers touching his lower lip. The blue eyes scroll across my face assessingly. If I speak now, my voice will tremble and I’ll betray myself. So I don’t. Instead I nod, as though Bethany’s transferral to one of the most brutal institutions in the country is worth mature consideration, and will make no difference to me.
‘Any particular reason?’ I manage finally.
‘I’m merely following the guidelines. They’re very clear when it comes to repeated self-harm. Another approach is called for.’
‘You realise what will happen to her there?’ I say as calmly as I can. ‘That all the progress she’s made here in Oxsmith will be undone? That they’ll pump her with drugs until she’s practically a vegetable?’
He shrugs. ‘A safe vegetable. No longer a danger to herself or others. Look, the ECT experiment was a mistake.’
‘It worked.’
‘For a while. But she just stuck a fork in an electric socket, knowing it could kill her. Look, I’m prepared to take responsibility for the ECT decision, I’m the one who signed the forms, and it seemed like the right treatment at the time. It produced an improvement. But now it’s backfired and I admit defeat. Anyway. Since you’ve been her most recent therapist, I just thought you should know. As soon as she’s free to leave hospital, she’s no longer our patient.’
‘Or our problem.’
He smiles tightly. ‘Semantics. There’s no dishonour in admitting that Bethany Krall’s treatment here has been one of our most spectacular failures.’
‘How long will they keep her in St Swithin’s?’
‘Until the burns heal. Take tomorrow off. You look dreadful.’
It’s late. I hesitate, then call the physicist. His phone is busy, so I decide to drive over and tell him what’s happened, hoping that I’ll end up staying the night, and that the tension engendered by our disastrous trip to London will dissolve with a session in bed. What I need is sex. With Frazer Melville. To be in his arms.
A jogger thunders up the pavement outside Frazer Melville’s house, accompanied by three high-stepping dogs on long leashes. There’s no space free directly in front, so I park opposite. The lights are on in his living-room. I’m just about to dial his number so that he can help me negotiate the steps when I glance at the house again. I don’t know why. But that’s when I see her. She’s tall, and wearing jeans, and standing at his window, looking out. Blonde. Trim. Young. She wasn’t there when I pulled up. But now, like a horrible jack-in-the-box, she has materialised in the physicist’s home. Then I see him emerging from the kitchen. Is that where she has come from, too? Has he cooked for her? Like a car driven by a reckless drunk, my heart attempts a sickening U-turn. Fails. And stalls.
The woman looks at home.
She moves away from the window and over to the sofa, where the physicist settles next to her, close enough for their bodies to touch. They’re looking at something together, heads lowered over the table. He wants to impress her. And she’s considering the matter. She has the power.
By now I’m not just trembling. I am shuddering all over. And I can’t seem to stop.
His ex, I realise. Melina. Since the e-mail, she’s been worried about him. So she’s flown over. To take care of him. She doesn’t look Greek. Has she stopped being a lesbian? Does she want him back? Does he want her?
Or not Melina. Someone else. A young colleague. One of his students.
Have they fucked yet?
She crosses her legs and I feel a flash of venomous, untamed envy. She can stand on them, she can run with them, she can use them to get up and down, she can spread them when he’s entering her. A dry retch hatches in my throat.
It makes sense, the kind of obvious sense a 3-D puzzle makes when you slot the last piece into the right configuration, having wrestled with it for hours.
I am not a real woman any more, and I was wrong to think I was. My mistake was to assume there were no other women in his life. Women with elegance and slim, fully functioning legs, Melina or someone else, someone who has every right to take a sexual interest, and is worth losing weight for. Women who can stand up, and turn on their heel, as she is now doing, and wander across the room to look at the books on the shelves, as though she is contemplating moving in, and wondering where hers will fit. Can you die from jealousy? It feels like you can, and that I will.
I am about to start the car and make my getaway. But suddenly, appallingly, I can’t — because the physicist has jumped to his feet and is heading directly for the window.
Terrified that he’ll spot me, I duck. Not easy. My heart’s thumping. Bent double like an ignoble paperclip, I’m having trouble breathing. I am absurd. I am raging. My chest is tight, my upper spine hurts, I am still shuddering. I force myself to stay with my head tucked down by the steering wheel, not daring to look up in case I reveal myself. The blood rushes to my head. My hands and my mouth and breasts are not enough for him, however alive they are, however greedy for his touch, however responsive. Because when the physicist and I make love, below the waist I am as lifeless as a blow-up doll. And nothing can change that. Ever.
When I finally dare to look up again, there’s an almost sick relief in seeing my worst fears confirmed.
I am free to drive home now, because the physicist has done what couples do when they require privacy.
He has closed the blinds and blocked out the world.