There are many things I would like to believe in, because they would accord life coherence. One of them is God. Another is the notion that on the brink of death, one’s life dances before one’s eyes in kaleidoscopic fragments: dramas, traumas, transcendent highs, troughs of gloom, or the crystallised moments that encapsulate a certain mood on a certain day, like — for me — the smell of forsythia blossom at nursery school, or a turn of phrase — ‘ça va tourner au vinaigre’ — used by my mother, bitterly, to someone on the phone, or the pop of the dog-fleas Pierre and I picked from our terrier and flicked on to the barbecue, or the appalling intimacy of my first kiss, or the body-blow of my mother’s death, or the chaos of Pierre’s wedding, or the aching realisation that dawned when my father said ‘Mesopotamia’ instead of ‘kitchen’, or the night I shouted at Alex and he swerved, or the morning the doctors gave me the final assessment of my paraplegia and for want of anything better to do, I glanced at the clock and noted that it was eleven twenty-three. Or August 22nd, the day of the Istanbul earthquake, when there was no longer any doubting Bethany, and I crossed a line.
A line now so far behind me that my old life feels surreal.
It’s October but so sunny and warm it could still be summer. The popcorn smell of discount bio-fuel floats on a breeze that sets curled dried leaves rustling across the streets. Out on the horizon the blades of the wind turbines rotate under a blue sky jazzed with threads of cloud. I drive through a Hadport busy with morning ritual: people flocking to work or school, exercising dogs, opening up offices and shops, buying takeaway croissants and lattes, queuing for trams, heading for early-morning AA meetings or DIY hypermarkets or lovers’ arms. Fear and anticipation make for a motivating cocktail, the result being that I am in Thornhill by nine. I park at the station and, with an hour to kill, I head for the town’s famous medieval church, negotiating my way through a graveyard freakishly landscaped by subsidence, and shored up by crude cement bulwarks. Grit and builders’ sand collect in the shallow treads of my tyres as I skirt the leaning yews.
Even with the door opened wide, the sepulchre is dark, its chill that of a meat-freezer. Above the pulpit, the stained-glass windows hum with complex ecclesiastical matrices of colour divided and subdivided by black lead. On one wall, there’s a mural depicting Christ pinioned to the cross, head to one side, ribs jutting, speared wound gushing blood, crowds surging around. Shivering, I rummage in my purse and drop some coins into the collection box, inhaling the wax-and-saltpetre mustiness that pervades all houses of God measuring more than a thousand square metres. They’re raising money for drought-struck Africa because fresh water has been lost from a third of the Earth’s surface. Can this be true? Lost since when? If I were a believer I would pray and hunt for a votary candle. Instead, I scrutinise the stained glass in an attempt to decipher a coherent theme linking the panels, then at a quarter to ten, I spin back out into sunshine so fierce the colours are bleached clean away, leaving only glitter-edged shapes. Back at the car, I’m dumping my folded wheelchair on the passenger seat when the black bird-dream from last night drifts into my head, perhaps summoned by the lead interstices of the church’s stained glass. Ravens? Crows?
I feel a sudden, unexpected grin split my face. Praise be to the subconscious. Wheatfield with Crows. By WG.
I switch on the car radio, wondering if there might be more news about Bethany. Instead I get a phone-in about pensions, a subject the nation’s over-fifties are increasingly obsessed with. It’s one of those programmes where people ‘from all walks of life’ but all, coincidentally, middle class, recount their fiscal woes in a polite but subtly aggressive whine. Just as a financial expert is launching into an analysis of buy-back mortgages, the door of the newsagent’s opposite opens to disgorge a man in baggy jeans and a red-and-black T-shirt splatted with a cartoon tarantula, carrying a bumper pack of Haribos. He crosses the road, scans the car park and then heads for where I’m parked, his free hand raised in the casual greeting of an old mate. He’s mid-thirties, with a tumble of unkempt black hair and wraparound shades. He could be a former skateboarder, or the drummer in a band that has not yet lost hope. I switch off the radio and lower my window.
‘Gabrielle Fox?’ he asks. I nod. ‘Then I’ll join you in the car if I may.’ Whatever the circumstances, an Antipodean accent never fails to make me smile.
‘Be my guest. Whoever you are. You’ll have to move my chair.’
He goes round to the passenger door, opens it, flings the Haribos carelessly on to my lap, and with one hand swings the wheelchair on to the back seat, then settles next to me and fastens his belt. ‘I hope these aren’t for me,’ I tell him. ‘Because I don’t like liquorice. My nephews always fight over the jelly eggs.’
‘They’re for Bethany. She likes the black shoestrings. I’m Ned Rappaport. I’m a climatologist.’
That invisible question mark at the end of the sentence: so full of optimism. We shake hands. His grip is firm, his forearm bronzed, his muscles toned. Further up his arm, below his sleeve, there is a tattoo of a small lizard. In the days before female life died in me, this configuration of characteristics might have given me an interesting frisson.
‘Australian?’
‘From Brisbane originally. Went to uni there.’ Where between seminars he surely surfed and smoked weed. ‘But I’ve lived in the US mostly, working for the NOAA.’
‘Which is known to the uneducated as?’
‘The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. I quit a few years back. Got fed up after spending fifteen years modelling climate disaster scenarios and making recommendations that no one ever listened to. Went freelance after Hurricane Valentine. Let’s go for a drive. Left at the exit, then first right.’ He sneezes suddenly. ‘Sorry. Hay fever.’ So. Human after all.
‘How’s Bethany?’ I ask, turning on the ignition and pulling out. The agitation has been building despite my efforts to quell it. Anything could be happening in that head of hers, after two years cooped up in Oxsmith. How could a Brisbanian climatologist with a tattoo on his biceps be expected to spot the warning signs?
‘Well, her hands and arms are on the mend. I’ve been changing the dressings every day. And she’s mad as a box of frogs. But no surprises there, right?’
‘Energy levels?’
‘Oh, she’s up in the stratosphere.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ I say, nodding at the Haribos. ‘Is someone with her at all times?’
‘More or less. Follow the signs for the ring-road. She has the run of the house but we keep the doors locked at night just in case. And I’ve killed the sockets in her room. To be honest, she’s been getting pretty out of control. Keeps demanding volts. Not that I know what’s normal, when it comes to schizos. You’ll see for yourself in a couple of hours’ time, if there’s not too much traffic. We’re hoping you’ll exert a calming influence.’
I tighten my grip on the wheel as I assess what he has said. ‘So the reason I was contacted is that you can’t handle her?’
His profile changes shape. ‘I was given the impression you’d be willing to be part of this. Am I wrong?’ His concern sounds genuine.
‘I never agreed to being kept in the dark.’
A sheepish expression takes hold. ‘I know. I’m sorry. But we discussed it. No one was happy about it, but the consensus was, it was necessary.’
‘A consensus can be an alienating thing, if you’re excluded. Which I was. Who’s we?’
‘Me, Frazer and Kristin Jons dottir. She’s the—’
‘I know who she is,’ I interrupt, more sharply than is called for. ‘I looked her up.’
He eyes me sideways. ‘Frazer figured that if you knew we were taking Bethany, you’d have objected. Or if you’d agreed, you’d have been compromised. If Bethany’s right, there are a lot of lives at stake.’
After Istanbul, I cannot attempt to dispute that. Or diminish the moral implications. So when something selfish and rebellious stirs inside me, I suffocate it with difficulty and a certain bitterness. I concentrate on the road.
‘Is everything OK?’
‘Just about as OK as it can be, considering the circumstances under which we meet,’ I say lightly, and flash him a Cinnamon Kiss smile, the kind air hostesses use for passengers who hand them a used sick-bag. ‘So were you the kidnapper, or did you subcontract?’
‘Guilty. But there was no coercion involved. She didn’t object. On the contrary.’
I can see how being abducted by a disaster geek who wears comedy T-shirts and takes sugar orders might be Bethany’s dream come true. Or one of them.
‘So how did you get involved in all this?’
‘Frazer and I go way back. He did a stint at the NOAA.’
Which he perhaps told me about. And which I perhaps forgot. ‘So where is he now?’ The physicist: the bruise I keep pressing. Even though it hurts. Because it hurts.
‘He stopped off in Paris, on his way back from Bangkok. He phoned Kristin last night.’ He glances at his watch. ‘He should be on his way.’
I am cudgelled by jealousy. The physicist called Kristin Jons-dottir rather than me. Of course he did. Because she’s the one he’s fucking, and he was using me all along, and now he is using me again, and like a sucker, I am expected to collude — for the sake of a world I care about less and less the more I know it.
Behind my ribs, a huge, toxic worm begins to writhe.
We drive on for fifteen minutes in silence.
‘Do you think the concept of putting other people first is overrated?’ I ask eventually. Being an idealist, he probably imagines I am thinking about all those whose lives will be shattered by the catastrophe that Bethany sees flickering on the horizon like a demented mirage. But he doesn’t know about the contortions of my inner worm. I am thinking of someone I know intimately: me. With particular regard to a certain physicist who has so crushed my morale that I fear I will never think straight again. I am thinking of lost love and misplaced devotion and absent wheelchair ramps in waterlogged wildernesses, of dashed hope and practicalities and the helplessness of being left alone with two useless legs in a tunnel with no light at the end.
Ned looks at me sharply. ‘Are you telling me you think it’s overrated?’
I fill my lungs and breathe out slowly, as I encourage people to do in my relaxation classes. ‘Being human, it’s a question I can’t answer,’ I say. And stare out of the window at the cornfields. ‘Van Gogh committed suicide after painting a scene like this.’
‘We could stop if you need to.’
‘I’m fine,’ I say, finally hauling my components together. This man is clearly in the dark about my relationship with the physicist. I shoot him a shaky smile. ‘Explain the postcard with the bagpiper.’
‘A diversionary tactic.’
‘I’m glad to know you’re taking Bethany seriously enough to risk a prison sentence. But Detective Kavanagh’s no fool.’
‘He’ll still have to have it investigated, and that requires manpower, which is a pain in the arse for him.’ The climatologist slaps an insect on his forearm and inspects it. ‘If Kavanagh rings, don’t say where you are. Say you’ll call him back, and when you do, you’ll know what to say because I’ll have told you. This visit is just a day trip for you. You’ll have to drive back to Hadport this evening.’
Although I understand the rationale and the non-negotiability of this, the prospect doesn’t appeal to me. When I packed my suitcase, I must have thrown in more hope, or foolhardiness, or self-delusion, than I realised.
‘Where are we going?’
‘A farmhouse in Norfolk. Belonging to a marine biologist mate of mine. He’s somewhere in the Arctic Circle, digging up deep-sea worms. He’s one of the world’s leading experts on chemi-luminescence. Those GM glow-in-the dark rice paddies they’re experimenting with in Asia? That research was done by one of his students. Who defected to the darkish side.’ Ned gives me a sidelong smile. But I don’t smile with him. More questions are formulating themselves.
‘From what I’ve worked out, this is all about frozen methane. That somebody’s been drilling for.’
‘That’s what the drawings suggest. When Kristin first saw them, she was impressed by the detail.’
‘She was one of the people Frazer contacted?’
‘No, not directly. But his mail was passed on to her. She got in touch with him.’ And then they became lovers. ‘And he rang me and I flew in. Turn right at the next junction. Let’s get the news.’
He switches on: a tinny blast of music announces it’s eleven o’clock. More food riots in developing countries. The mayor of London has pleaded guilty to charges of embezzlement. And the father of Bethany Krall, the psychiatric patient missing after being abducted from a general hospital on Wednesday, has made an emotional appeal for her safe return. Ned and I exchange a glance and he reaches to turn up the volume.
‘My daughter is a very sick child,’ says the Reverend Leonard Krall. His voice is velvety, thick with sadness. ‘She desperately needs psychiatric and spiritual help. Please, if you have seen Bethany or you know where she is, call the police, or take her to the safety of your church. We’re all praying for her return.’
Ned switches off the radio. Behind the sunglasses, he is looking at me intently. ‘Surprised?’
I think for a moment. ‘Yes. On two counts. First that they’ve named her publicly so soon. Second that Leonard Krall’s chosen to get involved. He never bothered to visit her once in Oxsmith.’
‘So why did he?’
‘Because I think he genuinely believes she’s dangerous. He’s a Faith Waver. Satanic possession, Creationism, the Rapture, the whole can of worms. Joy McConey—’
‘The shrink with cancer?’ I nod. ‘Frazer told us she was a convert to his way of thinking.’
‘My guess is that Bethany perceived Joy’s illness before it was officially diagnosed. When Joy refused to get her out of Oxsmith, Bethany let her think she’d caused it. It would have given her a feeling of power.’
‘And in the event of a disaster…’ He doesn’t need to finish the question, and I don’t need to answer it. My mind has been speeding along the same track. If the forthcoming catastrophe is publicly linked to Bethany, and people like Leonard Krall and Joy McConey give it their spin, we have a witch-hunt on top of whatever else we’re facing. We contemplate the depressing implications of this for a moment.
‘So you’ve specialised in these clathrates?’ I ask eventually.
‘No. But I modelled a lot of scenarios at the NOAA. Methane catastrophes among them. Since the energy companies started trying to exploit the sub-oceanic hydrates, the drilling’s increased the threat. Dramatically. Post-peak oil, everyone’s after it. China, the US, India. Hundreds of experimental rigs, planted off coastlines all round the world.’
‘How do they access the gas?’
He makes a contemptuous noise. ‘By playing Russian roulette. You can inject hot water beneath the seabed to destabilise the hydrates. Which will force a pressure change and release methane. The gas moves along the cracks and works its way up. Then you can liquidise the hydrate on the ocean floor and pipe it up like oil and gas. Or release frozen chunks of it from the sea floor and trap them at the surface of the ocean in giant tarpaulins. Exploit the hydrate fields safely, and there’s no such thing as an energy problem. Methane’s cleaner than oil or coal, if you handle it right. You can power anything with it, and it’s there in quantities you can’t even imagine. But it’s highly volatile. Which means it may cost more than anyone’s ever paid for anything. Ever.’
‘But with the climate protocols — ?
Ned Rappaport gives a bleak grunt. ‘They were being flouted before they were even established. Never underestimate the hypocrisy of governments, or the selfishness of a tribe.’ He swats at another insect. He seems to attract them. ‘And the human capacity to think wishfully. And in the short term. Politicians will say one thing and do another. Or do things that cancel one another out. Don’t look for logic.’
‘So if something happens—’
‘Then, to put it brutally, Gabrielle, we’re fucked.’
I drive on in silence.
Having headed north from Thornhill we cross the M25 and travel up to Norfolk. Somewhere between Ely and King’s Lynn, there’s a sprawl of retail parks and housing estates and processing plants which fall away, leaving the flat countryside gaping at us again: furrowed fields that meld into a horizon pricked with pylons and vanilla-coloured sheep grazing under a low sky. We’re on a straight road flanked by unseasonal primroses and a brackish, putrescent canal, black as dye. The sun is lurking behind a slur of congealed grey cloud. There’s a smell of silage and burnt vegetation with a chemical undercurrent. After fifteen kilometres, we turn down a rough track fringed with nettles, briar studded with rosehips, and random patches of mustard. I wind down the window and catch a whiff of diesel and oilseed rape. We round a bend and the landscape opens up again to reveal the shallow slope of a hill and a grey stone house, its garden enclosed by a scrape of herringbone wall. Beyond is a small glistening lake surrounded by clusters of silver birch, a deserted greenhouse and a huge wind turbine rotating with mournful grandeur.
‘It’s secluded, but we can’t base ourselves here for long,’ says Ned. Now that we have arrived, he seems tense, as though this morning’s visit to Thornhill for our rendezvous was a relaxing interlude in the midst of something prolonged and unbearable. ‘We’ll need to move out again soon. You can park round the back.’
I catch my breath as we skirt the turbine.
She is there.
Her back is turned, but I recognise her immediately. Her hair is brighter than in the photo. And finer. Like pale, spun honey. She is talking on the phone. I don’t know how I will handle meeting her.
‘That’s Kristin,’ says Ned. I try to look interested instead of appalled. ‘I’m hoping that the person she’s talking to is Harish Modak.’
Modak: the Planetarian with the hooded eyes. The eco-movement’s éminence grise. ‘The connection being?’ Hearing the engine, Kristin Jons dottir turns and smiles and points at the phone, indicating she will join us when she has finished her call. Ned waves back.
‘His wife Meera was Kristin’s supervisor and mentor. And a mother-figure too, I gather. After Meera died, Kristin stayed in touch with Harish Modak.’ She is wearing a long sweater but you can see the shape of breasts and hips beneath it. ‘Modak is our biggest hope at the moment. If we can get him on board, we’ll get the attention we need.’
‘And if we can’t?’ I can see why the physicist would want her in his arms. What sane man wouldn’t?
‘I’d like to say we’ll find another way. But I can’t.’
I think: I shouldn’t even blame him.
‘So what if Harish Modak can’t be convinced?’ I ask, to distract myself.
‘He has to be,’ says Ned, pointing ahead. ‘Just pull up here. That’s why Frazer’s been in Paris. He took Bethany’s drawings with him, and just about everything else he could lay his hands on. But Modak’s a difficult old bugger. He wants more evidence.’
I stop and turn off the engine. ‘Would he be willing to speak out publicly if he had it?’
Ned stifles another sneeze and opens his door. ‘There’s no telling with Modak. He’s seventy-eight. He doesn’t have kids. And he has no great affection for the species. He thinks we’ve been hard-wired to self-destruct as part of some Gaiac cycle. To him we’re just a species like any other. And species come and go. So if he ends up believing us, he may still decide to do nothing. Just shrug his shoulders, say we’re getting what we deserve, and enjoy the fireworks.’
‘How would you propose to change his mind?’
‘You’re the psychologist,’ he says, undoing his seat belt.
‘Is that the other reason I’m here?’
He flashes me a boyish, winning smile. Even in a foul mood, with my worm wreaking havoc, I can’t dislike him.
He opens the car door. ‘I’ll get your chair.’
The interior of the house exudes the nostalgic, grandmotherly smell of wood-polish. Low ceilings. Darkness, after the blaze of the sun, giving way slowly to a dull ivory gloom as the eyes recalibrate. Thick ceiling beams. From upstairs, the sound of a running shower which abruptly stops.
‘That’ll be Bethany,’ says Ned. ‘Glad to say she’s discovered hygiene. She’ll be down in a minute. This way.’
I follow him along a corridor past an impressive if haphazard collection of art: dark woodcuts, limpid watercolour landscapes, heavier oils, and lavishly detailed diagrams of insects, fish and molluscs. Sometimes you don’t realise how hungry your eyes have been. Perhaps it’s a displacement urge. But I want to gorge.
Ned Rappaport pushes open a dark door to reveal a cavernous living-room-cum-study fetid with age. The blinds are drawn, but through the gloom I can make out a clutter of old sofas and armchairs, a coffee table, a computer desk and a collection of glass cabinets packed with specimens of dried fish, fossils, pickled worms and seashells, all carefully labelled according to genus and era. Someone methodical has been at work in this fusty space, diligently categorising. On two of the walls are shelves full of jars which glow with a pale, ectoplasmic light. Entering the room and drawing closer, I see they’re filled with small green-blue shrimp-like crustaceans with delicate claws, trapped in a liquid suspension.
‘What are they?’ I ask, pulled towards their luminosity like a moth.
With an enormous hand, Ned pulls down a jar and passes it to me. It’s heavy and cool. Clasping it between my palms, I peer in at the pickled, tentacled shape. Around it, small light-filled fragments rise from the bottom and swirl in the cloudy light that emanates from the centre of its body, fading at the delicate extremities.
‘Myodocopia. Ostracod. They’re chemi-luminescent. They release a dye as a mating signal. It can go on emitting light-waves even after the animal has died. Collective name, Luxifer gigans. Japanese soldiers used them in World War Two. They’d collect them on the beaches, then crush them up and smear the stuff on their hands. As an instant light source.’ He takes the jar back and replaces it on the shelf. ‘Now, according to my research, you won’t co-operate fully with anything until you’ve had coffee. I’ll get some in the works.’ He tosses the Haribos on to an overstuffed green sofa, its upholstery burst at one end, and heads for the door.
‘Ned. Wait.’
But it has closed behind him.
After driving for so long I’m aware of the need to shift the weight off my pelvis, so I wheel further into the room, negotiating my way around the cabinets. Near a fireplace stuffed with pine cones and dried birch branches, there’s a tattered, red-striped chaise-longue on whose padded upholstery I can imagine myself getting comfortable. Next to it, a walnut coffee table studded with cup-rings, and opposite, the green sofa and a couple of sagging leather armchairs of the kind favoured by old men’s clubs. I manoeuvre out of my wheelchair and on to the chaise-longue, take off my shoes, heave my legs up, and settle lengthways. Thin stripes of light filter through the slats of the blinds, dancing with dust-motes. My eyes are still adjusting, so I don’t see her come in.
Or hear her. Until—
‘BOO!’
I jump, and stifle a scream.
‘Scared you there, Wheels.’
Wet from the shower, her T-shirt blotched with damp, her scalp speckled with a thin growth of stubble, Bethany Krall resembles a manic voodoo doll. The thermal burn-marks streaking her arms are a virulent purple leached with yellow, her hands a mess of tattered, blistered skin. Spreading her arms wide, she waggles them at me in a vaudeville gesture. They look like terrible, ravaged starfish.
‘Bethany. I’m glad to see you.’
‘Watch out, we’ll be lesbian lovers next.’
She comes towards me, too fast, her arms held aloft, as though wielding huge mechanical pincers. Stranded without my chair, I shift to an upright position.
‘How have you been?’ I ask. I need more space between us. But within seconds, I have it: catching sight of the Haribo packet on the sofa, she leaps over, snatches it up and starts tearing it open with her teeth. I curse myself for not hiding it.
‘How d’you think I’ve been?’ She closes the space again by leaping on to the coffee table where she stands barefoot, like a vicious elf, her green leggings stained with patches of damp where she failed to dry off, a sickly chemical smell seeping out of the sweet-packet in her hand. Fishing inside, she finds a spiral of liquorice, unrolls it clumsily, and dangles the end into her mouth, face tipped back. ‘This place is like a five-star hotel. Want one?’ She is on the cusp of something. Glad to be free. And free to—
‘No thanks. And go easy on the sugar.’ She rolls her eyes.
I shift again. I feel vulnerable without my chair, and regret abandoning it. She’s still standing right over me, flexing her ruined hands.
‘Hey, I’ve got this weird electric feeling in my fingers.’
‘It’s called pain. It’s something normal. Why don’t you take a seat?’
‘Have you felt how close we are to the sea?’ she asks, jumping off the table and moving across to the window. She can’t seem to stay still. ‘It’s breathing at us. Can you feel it? Can you smell it? If you want to survive, you’ve got to go inland.’ She flicks the blinds further open and daylight streams in. Outside, the road, the bright landscape, the greenhouse, the wheeling white blades of the wind turbine. ‘Cabins in the mountains, that’s what we need. I’d go there, except I’d miss the grand finale. I need some volts, Wheels. Can you get me some in this place?’
As she is speaking, a grey car comes into view. With a thudding, forlorn dread, I consider who might be inside it, on his way. Then, from behind the greenhouse, Kristin Jons dottir appears, pocketing her phone and heading for the front door. She is looking worried. Or perhaps simply thoughtful. I wonder how she feels about meeting me. On the doorstep, she stops and turns. She must have heard the car.
‘Here comes loverboy,’ murmurs Bethany, following my gaze. I want to look away. But I can’t. He pulls up, parks and gets out. Kristin Jons dottir runs towards him. There is no mistaking the look on her face. My face used to light up like that once. And my heart used to—
I blink and swallow as they embrace.
‘They’ve been fucking like rabbits,’ comments Bethany matter-of-factly. They have pulled apart and Kristin Jons dottir is speaking to Frazer Melville excitedly, gesturing towards the house. He looks pleased, then anxious. ‘Look at them. He can’t get enough of her.’ Tipping her head back again, she feeds herself another string of liquorice, eyeing me sidelong. ‘She’s a real moaner. She has these orgasms that go on and on.’ Bethany stops and assesses my face. ‘And he’s noisy too. When he comes, he roars. Right, Wheels?’ She grins. ‘He roars like a lion.’
I tear my eyes from the window and shut then, trying not to remember. I am in freefall, hurtling through nothingness.
Not just naked, but skinned.
‘Coffee,’ announces Ned, entering with a small tray. ‘Colombian. Frazer told me it was your favourite so I got some in. And I see you found the Haribos, Bethany. Hey, is everything OK?’
No, I want to tell him. Please, get me out of here before I die.
‘We were just talking about sex,’ says Bethany with enthusiasm. ‘Who’s doing what with who.’ Ned looks at me blankly and I muster a small non-committal shrug. But Bethany is on a roll. ‘You wank a lot, don’t you, Ned?’ His face tightens and a muscle starts working beneath his stubble. She grins. ‘I guess you miss your boyfriend. Or should I say your ex-boyfriend. You might not guess to look at him, Wheels, but Ned here likes cock.’ She throws him a triumphant, jackpot look.
I flush. Of course. Ned’s jaw moves, as though he’s chewing on something, and his Adam’s apple strains. I feel a grievous rush of pity for him. He sets the tray down on the table and begins pouring the coffee.
‘I don’t remember discussing my private life with you, Bethany,’ he says.
‘You didn’t,’ she says. ‘But I picked up the vibe. I do that, don’t I, Wheels? It’s one of my irritating skills.’
Ned looks at me with a question on his face. I shake my head. The only surprise is that she left it this long.
Just outside, beyond the window, I can hear Frazer Melville and Kristin Jons dottir talking in low, urgent voices. I must get away or this will kill me. But Bethany, with her feeling for turbulence, intercepts: with a quick movement, she has re-angled my empty wheelchair and given it a shove. Silently, it rolls across the room and settles by the door, far out of reach.
‘Stuck,’ she says. ‘Stranded.’
I glance across at Ned, who obliges me by rolling the chair around the back of the chaise-longue and settling it where I can rest my hand on it. Outside, the talking stops and I hear a single set of footsteps approaching. When the door opens, I can’t look. But I know it’s the physicist. I can feel him standing in the doorway, his height filling the frame.
‘Gabrielle. Thank God you’re here. It all worked out.’ Frazer Melville sounds excited, unaware of the psychic pain washing the room. ‘Hi, Bethany, hi, Ned.’ I take a sip of coffee, blocking him out, savouring the miniature moment of escape.
‘I was just telling Gabrielle about you and Kristin,’ says Bethany. She grins wide, like a gargoyle, revealing a blackened tongue. ‘But now you’re here, you can tell her yourself.’
When she electrocuted herself, why didn’t she just die?
Flushing fiercely, I glance sideways. He’s moving towards me, but when he sees the look on my face — a look I can’t hide — he stops in his tracks and his smile fades. Bethany sucks in her breath theatrically.
‘Ooh, she’s angry, Frazer, I’m warning you! You’d better protect your balls! Catch you later!’
Thrilled with herself, she snatches up her Haribos, runs across to the doorway, ducks under the physicist’s arm and out of the room.
Ned, silently sipping coffee on the sofa opposite me, seems absorbed in his own painful thoughts. The physicist and I look at one another. I see the green shard but I won’t let it pull me in. I long to be back in my wheelchair but if I transferred to it now, I’d reveal my weakness. Bethany is right. I am stuck.
‘Gabrielle,’ he says softly.
He comes forward — to do what, embrace me? Seeing me recoil, he hesitates, sighs and settles himself into the armchair next to my chaise-longue. He is too big and too close. I ache for him and hate myself for it.
‘We kept you in the dark to protect you.’ His voice is gentle but there’s a hint of defiance.
‘Like hell.’ And anyway, I think bleakly. It’s not about that.
‘It’s true,’ says Ned, topping up my coffee. I breathe in sharply and feel the bile shoot through my blood. ‘I can see why you’d be angry but Frazer figured that if you lost your job you’d be in big trouble. Personally and professionally. Seriously, Gabrielle. We thought it through.’
‘I did lose my job.’
‘Oh no,’ says Frazer Melville. ‘God. Oh, Gabrielle, I’m so sorry.’
‘Don’t mention it.’ I take a sip. The coffee is good. Strong and dark and fortifying. ‘I’m now officially unemployable.’
‘Actually that won’t matter in the larger scheme of things, if Bethany’s right,’ suggests Ned. Perhaps he believes he is being helpful.
Ignoring him, I address the physicist. ‘I may be restricted, physically. But your behaviour suggests you think I’m mentally incompetent with it.’
‘If you were to stay above suspicion with the police, you couldn’t know what we were planning. Or what we’d done.’ Frazer Melville’s expression is pleading. ‘I hoped I dropped enough clues for you to guess that I was behind it.’
‘Which I did when I covered for you with the police and risked imprisonment for perverting the course of justice.’
From the next room, The Simpsons theme tune blares at unbearable volume.
‘Someone wants some attention,’ Ned sighs, rising. ‘I’ll go and sort her out.’
‘Get those sweets off her,’ I call after him. ‘And if you have some, she needs fresh bandages.’
When the door has fully closed behind him, I take a deep breath. I can feel the physicist looking at me intently.
‘Sweetheart—’ He puts a hand on my arm but I shake him off violently.
‘Don’t touch me and don’t call me that!’
‘Hey, what’s going on with you?’ He sounds offended.
‘Tell me, what else have you been up to with Kristin Jons dottir?’
The physicist’s face switches from concern to bafflement. ‘I haven’t seen her. I’ve been in Thailand and Paris, in case you didn’t know. Why are you so angry?’
Where to begin? But I can’t. It’s too humiliating. Whatever I say will sound bitter and self-pitying. I have my pride. I shut my eyes and take a deep breath. When I open them again he is still there. In the next room, the TV noise stops and Bethany protests. I hear ‘bastard’ and ‘arsehole’ and some quiet remonstrations from Ned.
‘Well, if you won’t tell me…’
‘Do I have to spell it out? OK, I’ll spell it out. I know about her. OK? I know.’
‘Get the fuck off me!’ Bethany shrieks from the next room. ‘Cocksucking arsehole! I can do it myself!’ Then Ned’s voice, sharp with alarm: ‘Hey! Look what you’ve done! Jesus!’
The door opens and Kristin Jons dottir walks in, smiling.
She comes towards me, her hand outstretched. She has one of those faces you’d look at twice without quite knowing why. A broad forehead and calm eyes. A serenity. ‘Gabrielle. I’m so pleased to meet you at last.’
In the next room, Bethany has begun a new tirade.
‘Gabrielle,’ says the physicist, ignoring the noise. ‘This is Kristin.’
Reluctantly, I take the hand she offers, but drop it again as swiftly as possible.
‘Kristin Jons dottir with a soft J, pronounced Y,’ she says, smiling. ‘I am Icelandic.’ There’s a catch to her accent that might make you want to hear more, if you were in love with her. It strikes me that she seems to feel no embarrassment about meeting me. She even looks happy. Because — I flush as it dawns on me — the physicist never even told her we were lovers. Just as he never told Ned. I am no threat to her. And never have been.
‘I looked you up,’ I say. ‘But the soft J wasn’t mentioned.’ If she hears the irony in my voice, she ignores it. She is still smiling, taking me in with her calm, friendly eyes. The world of women is divided between those who can be bothered with make-up, those who can’t, and those who don’t need it in the first place. She’s the last: a fresh-air woman who offsets her carbon emissions.
‘I’ve been looking forward to this. Encounters with art therapists aren’t normally on the agenda of someone specialising in the world fifty-five million years ago.’
What about encounters with your lover’s cast-off girlfriends? I flash the physicist a furious look and he replies with a shrug, as though aggrieved. Ned comes in, looking shaken, greets Kristin, and slumps down gratefully on the sofa opposite me.
‘Whew. Jesus.’
‘All sorted?’ I ask.
‘She scratched me.’ He shows his forearm, striped with beads of blood. ‘So, Kristin. What did Harish Modak say?’
She takes a breath. ‘He’s still reluctant.’
‘I’ll go and ring him,’ says the physicist, rising to his feet. He probably can’t leave fast enough. ‘Ned, perhaps you and Kristin can fill Gabrielle in some more?’
‘Sure thing,’ says Ned, lifting a laptop from the floor and booting it up. ‘Just give me a minute and we’ll do a visual.’
‘So, Kristin. Geology,’ I say, when the door has closed behind the physicist. I pull the thunder egg from its pouch under my seat. I feel like hurling it at her, but instead I hold it out. She takes it, and a smile of great beauty illuminates her face. Her eyes are a delicate greyish green. She weighs it in her hand, then shakes it. ‘Solid. You’ve never been tempted to crack it open?’
‘I’m waiting for the right moment. It’s an heirloom.’
She smiles. ‘Where’s it from?’
‘Nevada.’
‘If it’s fromthe Black Rock Desert, it probably has a lovely opal filling. Some of them are agate. Or a mixture.’ So she can identify a piece of rock as fast as I can diagnose a loony. I hate her with a hate that I fear may be deeper than the deepest love. Handing the thunder egg back, she clasps her other hand over mine, enclosing it around the stone. ‘You’re upset with me. And you’re right to be. I owe you an apology.’
I shrink into myself. She is looking me in the eye with a terrible calmness. With a sharp movement, I tug my hand back. The last thing I’ve expected is candour. It might be more than I can bear. I take an inward breath. I too must be candid.
I say, ‘Yes. I think you do.’
Ned is watching us with interest. A spot of red has appeared on each of Kristin Jons dottir’s cheeks.
‘The way I handled things when you rang me out of the blue like that was unforgivable. I’m afraid I panicked. It never crossed my mind that you would find out about me, and then call. It threw me totally.’
‘I bet it did.’
‘You must be quite a detective.’
‘Not really. I just followed up a few clues.’
Ned interjects anxiously. ‘I told you: none of us felt good about keeping you in the dark.’ Heavily, he rises from the sofa and begins hanging a white bed-sheet from some nails above the fireplace. It seems he is constructing a makeshift whiteboard.
Kristin says, ‘I can only apologise. Again. When Frazer showed me the drawings and told me about Bethany’s ability, I wanted to talk to you. But he insisted that if we were going to intervene with her, you mustn’t be involved, because you’d be compromised professionally.’
‘Intervene is an interesting euphemism for what you did. So tell me. At what point did you decide to kidnap my patient?’ From the corner of my eye I register Ned’s increasing unease.
‘When we learned she was being moved to another facility. Where there’d be no access to her. The fact that she was in a public hospital made it easier.’
She looks down at the dark wood floor with delicacy, as though she is considering whether to polish it, and what product she might use to achieve maximal results. She is so patently unaware of the damage she’s wreaked, and so obviously pained by my hostility, that it almost hurts.
Ned steps back and contemplates his handiwork, then shifts the position of the laptop on the coffee table so that the screen is projecting on to the whiteboard, and adjusts the focus. Kristin Jons dottir leans forward on her chair earnestly, hands clasped together. Despite her good skin and fine, intellectual-looking bones, she probably never spends time gazing into mirrors. She doesn’t need to. She doesn’t need to because she knows who she is. Her sediment has settled, I think enviously. While mine is still moiling about. Perhaps that’s why Frazer Melville found her irresistible. Perhaps it isn’t a rejection of my paraplegia after all. Perhaps it’s a hundred thousand times worse.
‘When I saw Bethany’s drawings I was intrigued by the way in which these images occurred. These projections, these…’ Her Icelandic lilt trails off.
‘Visions,’ I finish. ‘Psychotic visions.’ For some reason I want to call a spade a spade. I want to be blunt and charmless and graceless. Despite the gloom, I can see the red of Kristin Jons-dottir’s cheekbones intensifying. Perhaps it has sunk in that my feelings towards her are neither benign nor sisterly. ‘Bethany says visions. Just so you know.’ How empiricists — and I include myself — disdain anything that smacks of the supernatural, of manipulative TV series, of low-budget believe-it-or-not, of strange-but-true.
‘Sorry to interrupt but I’m going to close the blinds now,’ says Ned quietly. ‘So I can project these images for you. And we can move on a bit?’ We both nod at him distractedly and the room darkens.
She says, ‘It’s not my field, so I can’t presume to comment on the genesis of the, er—’ She elegantly replaces the word ‘visions’ with a hand-gesture indicating something ephemeral being flung outward from the temples. ‘But with respect to the actual depictions—’
‘What Kristin’s getting at is, we need more information in order to locate the site of this possible disaster,’ says Ned, clicking his mouse. ‘Take a look at this.’ One of Bethany’s drawings appears on the sheet. He adjusts the contrast. ‘It’s got a lot of detail on it. Not the kind of detail you’d be aware of. Unless you knew the mechanics of rigs.’ He points to the platform, and the line that works its way down beneath the sea. ‘Images like this are what make us concerned that she’s seen the beginnings of a submarine landslide triggered by activity at one of the rigs. But we don’t know which one. They’re all fairly distinctive.’ He shoots me an amused glance. ‘The people who discover the sites are allowed to christen them, so they’ve mostly got quite fanciful names.’
Kristin gets up. ‘I’m going to get Frazer. I think he should be in on this.’ Something has finally got through to her. Good.
‘You were pretty tough on her there,’ says Ned, when she has gone. ‘Tougher than you were with me. And I was the one who kidnapped Bethany.’
I don’t answer. If he’s blind and stupid, then that’s his problem.
As Ned Rappaport scrolls through a list of images, I shift my legs into a new position on the chaise-longue. I will need all my strength to face the physicist again.
‘OK. Here are all the offshore rigs that we know are already experimenting with exploiting methane, plus ten that we suspect are converting from oil or gas production.’ With a click, the whiteboard is filled with a patchwork of images of ocean rigs, their platform scaffolds and spire-like derricks rearing from the sea: bleak constructions of iron and concrete, pounded by stormy seas or blanketed with snow or parked in sunlight in the iridescent turquoise of tropical waters, seemingly far from any coast. ‘The derricks are all bare metal but as you can see the lifting cranes come in all colours, just like cranes on land. I gather Bethany says the one we’re after is yellow, so…’ He shrinks the patchwork to several tighter images. On each of them stands a canary-coloured crane, several new-looking, but most with flaking paintwork. ‘Of these eight here, the three off the coasts of China, India and New Zealand are closed for machine refits, and one of the Russian ones hasn’t been operational for the past year. That leaves us with four suspects.’ He clicks again, quartering the whiteboard. ‘Buried Hope Alpha in the North Sea, Mirage in Indonesian waters, Lost World in the Caribbean, and Endgame Beta off the coast of Siberia. For various reasons to do with chronic mismanagement, my hunch is Endgame Beta.’
Frazer Melville and Kristin Jons dottir are talking animatedly as they enter the room.
‘Any luck with Harish?’ asks Ned. They look at one another and make a joint decision.
‘Some. But let’s talk Gabrielle through this first,’ says Frazer Melville.
He and Kristin Jons dottir position themselves on either side of me: he on one edge of the chaise-longue, and she on a chair to my left. Trapped, I give the whiteboard my full attention. Until this moment I have not paid offshore rigs a single thought.
‘They look heroic.’
‘They are,’ responds Frazer Melville, as though my remark is the correct answer to a secret, unuttered question. ‘All that human ingenuity and ambition. All that aspiration.’ It is almost like the beginning of the kind of conversation we used to have, in the days when we talked. ‘Until Bethany can give us more information we have to assume it’s any one of them. Now, if the submarine crack Bethany saw—’
He shifts closer to me on the edge of the chaise-longue. I lean away. But he is still close. I can feel the heat of his body.
‘That’s what she drew?’ I ask. I’m barely able to concentrate but I need to sound normal, for the sake of my own pride. ‘A crack?’
‘A fissure and a flashpoint,’ says Kristin Jons dottir. ‘To free the frozen methane from the ocean floor, they’ll have drilled beneath it horizontally and forced a pressure-change. But if they’ve miscalculated what’s down there, and the interference has widened the gap that’s already there, the pressure will build up. When it reaches a critical point, there’s a risk that huge amounts of this frozen methane — far more than they ever intended — could be unleashed.’
As she speaks, I am aware that Frazer Melville is trying to make further eye contact with me, but I resist. I wonder if Kristin told him about my hostility towards her, or whether other matters — like the phone call to Harish Modak — took precedence.
Ned says, ‘The sediment will destabilise and trigger a submarine avalanche. Possibly leading to the release of the entire methane reserve buried under the explored hydrate field. Thereby removing vast amounts of sediment above and adjacent to the methane. Creating further cascades across the whole area. In the case of any of these rigs, we’re talking about thousands of square kilometres. Followed by a huge tsunami. Which is likely to destabilise more sediment packages, leading to more massive landslides.’
With their scientific knowledge, the three others here can no doubt picture the whole delta-shaped flow chart of the disaster’s repercussions. But I am unable to. Instead, I envisage an oil painting in the style of Turner, a vast and magisterial canvas that depicts a churning miasma of water and wave and cloud: of pale, mother-of-pearl light that transforms into rose, then tangerine, then blood-red as the spume froths and bubbles and explodes into flame; in the foreground, the matchstick scaffold of a rig toppled by the force of colliding elements.
Which is not much use, except as an aesthetic comfort.
No: the information I am getting isn’t sinking in the way it should.
‘Which in turn is highly likely to trigger a further cycle of landslides and more tsunamis,’ says Ned. ‘With more of the hydrate field being dislodged and releasing more methane. Methane is ten times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than C02. If the whole thing spreads and escalates, we get runaway global warming on a scale that’s beyond anyone’s worst nightmare. Everywhere will be radically hotter. It used to be called the clathrate gun hypothesis. Back when it was only a hypothesis.’
The physicist is looking at me intensely, as if trying to gauge how much is getting through. Not much is. ‘Last time, geologically speaking, it happened as fast as the flick of a switch.’
They all have their eyes on me.
‘So we have to do what we can to warn people,’ says Kristin Jons dottir. ‘There’ll be huge coastal flooding. Not just locally. With the domino effect, within a very short time we’re talking about the whole globe.’ She blinks. ‘Scandinavians call it Rag-narok.’
‘Chaos,’ says Frazer Melville. ‘A kind of Hell.’ My heart shrinks to a tiny hard marble. What does he want: my approval? Ned flicks to the next image, of the Earth, spinning slowly and transmogrifying with each turn.
‘The last time it happened, glaciers melted, huge areas were flooded. There were mass extinctions. This time, whether it’s triggered off the coast of Siberia or Indonesia or Florida, it won’t just be that region that’s affected. It’ll flash-heat the whole planet. Imagine a cataclysm on a scale that humans have never seen before.’
I can’t. Not even with the Earth spinning in front of me, its white and blue and green patches shifting and melding into one another like a giant ball of plasticine.
‘But wouldn’t the energy company that owns it know about it?’ I can hear my own stubbornness. Denial, for now, feels like an appropriate response. They are all being absurd. It’s science fiction. The fact that there are precedents for such a catastrophe is irrelevant. These things may have happened in prehistory, but they can’t happen in the age of man. Nature can’t just destroy civilisation. We’ve come too far. We can cope with things on this scale nowadays. We can prepare for them.
Ned says, ‘There might not be any visible signs at this stage. But even if the company does know, it might not want to publicise it. Especially if it’s corrupt and mismanaged. There are plenty of those, believe me.’
‘It might try to contain it,’ I say. But even as I say it, I can hear the absurdity.
One side of my face feels hot, as though my body is registering what my brain is failing to. A moment passes. Kristin Jons dottir walks over to the window, re-angles the slats on one of the blinds, and stares out. Ned is clicking at his laptop, and the physicist, perhaps finally taking the hint that I want no more to do with him, is staring fixedly at the images on the whiteboard. Outside, a plane scrapes a white arc across the sky, leaving a delicate snail-trail of vapour.
‘So what now?’ I ask.
‘I spoke to Harish Modak,’ says Frazer Melville. ‘He still doesn’t share our sense of urgency. But I persuaded him to travel over from Paris tonight.’ He stops, and glances at Kristin. She nods her head. There’s more. Something she knows about, which neither of them is keen on conveying. ‘He’s coming on the understanding that we’ll have something new to show him by then. If not proof, then a compelling piece of supporting evidence.’
‘Why on earth did you say that when you can’t guarantee it?’ I’m baffled. Kristin gives me a strange, supplicant look.
‘Because it was all I could come up with. I was hoping that with your help, Bethany might be able to remember some more.’
Sharply, it becomes clear. ‘So this is where I come in, right? This is why I’m here?’
‘Gabrielle,’ says Kristin gently, ‘we do need your help. You have already gone further than anyone could have expected in this. But we can’t do this without you.’
I sigh, sickened. ‘If we want more information from Bethany, she has to have more ECT. Do you realise that? It’s the only way.’
There is a silence. Yes, they do realise.
‘It’s what she’s been telling us,’ confirms Kristin quietly. ‘It’s what seems to work.’
‘And I have to supervise it,’ I continue, thinking aloud. ‘And if it goes wrong I take responsibility.’
The physicist reaches out and rests his hand on mine and gives it a small squeeze. If I had any pride left I would shake it off but I need his touch. I can feel its heat. I can remember the time when a gesture like that would have flooded me with love. Now I just want to cry. He says softly, ‘You remember how we felt after Istanbul. That night, when we heard the news and—’
No. I don’t want to.
My phone rings. I should leave it — it’s not the moment — but I am relieved to have a distraction, an excuse to emerge. I flick it open — and instantly regret doing so.
‘Detective Kavanagh here. Where are you exactly, Miss Fox?’
‘At home,’ I lie quickly. A reflex. But the wrong one. ‘Let me call you right back,’ I say, thinking wildly of ways to right what I’ve just said, and signalling to Ned that I’ve been caught unawares. But he is shaking his head. It’s too late. I have blown it.
‘No need for that,’ says Kavanagh evenly. ‘If you’re at home, you can just open the door. I’m right outside. I’ve been ringing the bell. But no joy. I’m surprised to hear you’re in there, to be honest. Because there’s no sign of your car out here.’ I say nothing. ‘Have you heard of the term perverting the course of justice, Miss Fox? A dangerous minor’s been abducted. Bethany Krall is a known killer. That’s quite heavy stuff. I don’t know what kind of disabled facilities they have in a women’s prison like Holloway. But you can be sure there will be, er, art therapy. So if you’d care to—’
But he doesn’t get any further because I’ve shut my phone and turned it off.
‘Well, forget about going back to Hadport tonight,’ says Ned. ‘You’ve just become a criminal.’
The three of them are staring at me. From the next room comes the theme tune of Friends. I am a natural, deep-rooted pessimist, but somewhere along the way I trained myself in optimism, learning reflexes which I incorporated, as the years went by, until positive thinking came to dominate my mental landscape like an enforced code of conduct. But the bizarre rush of relief that I am feeling in the wake of Kavanagh’s call does not come from that. It’s not manufactured. Despite the renewed misery I have encountered here, it’s real. And I must trust it. I must trust it because perhaps, all along, I’ve had an intuition that this moment would come. A stowaway, furtive knowledge of where I have been headed, without knowing it, from the day I arrived at Oxsmith to meet Bethany Krall, from the evening a certain physicist and I fled the Armada to order poppadums in an Indian restaurant, from the afternoon he lit the bulb inside Bethany’s short-lived globe and the planet was illuminated, from the day Christ the Redeemer fell and Istanbul shuddered to dust, from the moment Kristin Jons dottir appeared on my computer screen with her red woolly hat and her chunk of flaming ice.
‘You questioned your involvement earlier,’ says Ned. ‘But given the sudden change in your legal status…’
I look at him, and at Frazer Melville and his lover. I try to think of the world. Its innocence. The children who will die. But for now, suddenly, all I can think of is me. My pain, my jealousy, my double loss of womanhood. My lack of any future.
I am not ready for any of this. I will never be ready.
If I shut my eyes tight, I can blot it all out.
‘Problem sorted,’ announces Bethany, striding in barefoot. She is brandishing a red plastic bucket. ‘Cereal, milk, one apple, an omelette and fifteen Haribos, thank you for those, Ned. Puked up the lot in three goes. So now my stomach’s empty for the anaesthetic and Wheels here has one less thing to fret about. Care to inspect?’
We don’t get the choice. Having done our duty, Ned and I exchange a glance which turns into a smile. You can’t help admiring Bethany’s commitment to her fix.
If I’d been told a few weeks ago that I would find myself in a creaking farmhouse unpacking medical paraphernalia with an Australian climatologist in a room where illegal electroconvulsive therapy would be shortly performed on a matricidal teenager I was suspected of abducting, I’d have had trouble believing it. But here I am with Ned Rappaport, in a small damp parlour, surrounded by boxes and bubble wrap. Before dark descended, I looked outside at an apple tree, its fruit littered across an overgrown meadow shaking with teasel-brushes and the flat shimmering coins of dried honesty, and I thought of my father’s garden, and then my father, and missed him so fiercely that I was ready to leave on the spot, drive to the care home, haul him out and bring him here, for no other reason than that I am the flesh of his flesh and I am lonely. The ECT machine is a small box similar to the one Dr Ehmet used at Oxsmith. Under my instructions, Ned has made up a low sofa as a bed.
‘Thank you Bethany,’ I tell her, nodding at the bucket. ‘Now please go and empty it. Preferably down a toilet rather than over someone’s head. We’ll call you back downstairs when we’re ready.’
Apart from worrying about Bethany’s food intake, a problem now neatly resolved, my main activity over the past couple of hours has been avoidance of the physicist. Savouring the relief and the pain of his absence, I gaze out of the window.
Autumn Evening with Approaching Headlights.
‘That,’ says Ned, ‘will be the man.’
When we reach the front door, a tall skinny man in jeans is being greeted by a reluctant-looking Kristin Jons dottir and the physicist, whose eye I still refuse to meet.
‘Let’s not bother with names,’ says Ned quickly. ‘Less grief all round.’
The anaesthetist looks young enough to be straight out of medical school. His long pale hair is parted in the middle and hangs to his shoulders in a way that exaggerates his narrow, pencilled features, and his skin bears the sullen pallor of long hours exposed to fluorescents and halogens. There’s a vulnerability about him that’s familiar but which I can’t immediately place. He tweaks his mouth in a generalised hello. There’s a subdued atmosphere. Kristin, in particular, looks as though she would rather be anywhere — perhaps at the bottom of the sea with her frozen ice molecules — than here. I almost pity her. In an upstairs room, a clock chimes six.
‘We’ll get out of your hair,’ Frazer Melville says. ‘Just call if you need us.’
‘And you’re the one responsible for the patient?’ asks the anaesthetist. I nod. ‘Then I’ll need you there with me. As soon as we’re done with the procedure I’ll want to get going. And — no offence, but I want to forget I ever came here.’
‘Is this guy safe?’ I ask Ned when Kristin Jons dottir has melted discreetly upstairs, and Frazer Melville has led the medic to the parlour.
‘Yes. But he doesn’t have to like the situation.’
‘So how did you persuade him in the first place?’
Ned looks evasive. ‘We’re living by new priorities. Not all the choices we make are going to be of the finest moral quality.’
‘I can tell you’ve hung around with politicians. Are you going to add that the end will justify the means?’ He doesn’t answer. I sigh. ‘I’ll need the pictures of all four rigs ready so we can look at them immediately afterwards. I’m hoping she’ll spot a detail that clinches it. We’ll need good definition. Some new angles, if you can get them.’
‘Right. I’ll go summon the princess.’
When Bethany comes downstairs, barefoot, rebandaged and unkempt, she’s hungry for action. Grabbing the handles of my chair despite my protests, she pushes me at high speed down the corridor and into the parlour, where she greets the medic with a ‘Yo, doc’ and a blazing orthodontic grin. He returns it with a baleful look, and eyes her as she settles herself on the low sofa, humming tunelessly and picking at the scabs on the exposed parts of her arms.
I have often wondered what draws anaesthetists to a profession which requires one to so finely judge the line between the conscious and the unconscious self, the living state and the dead. Their high suicide rate is ascribed to the ready availability of the means, but something about the way this young man carries himself makes me speculate there’s more to it than that. As for Bethany, a stranger is about to blast her brain with electricity in a medical procedure whose effectiveness has never been understood — and she is ready and willing. The trust involved, the inevitability of a massive power imbalance, and the paradoxical absence of intimacy between Bethany and the anonymous doctor, makes for an emotionally lurid contract, I reflect, watching him adjust the position of the small machine on the coffee table. He inserts a rubber wedge in her mouth: she opens wide to accept it with uncharacteristic docility. Her bare feet are smudged with what looks like mud. The medic takes it all in, but doesn’t enquire about how Bethany became injured. Or indeed, why she is here.
‘Ready?’ he asks. She nods. For both of them, it’s a familiar routine. He puts the anaesthetic bag over her nose and mouth, then wipes her temples with a wet sponge.
A few moments later, Bethany’s eyelids have closed and she has succumbed. I hold my breath. The medic flicks the timer on and applies the electrodes to her temples. He presses them in place, but after a few seconds he frowns as though dissatisfied.
‘Her brain’s built up a resistance,’ he murmurs. The seconds tick by. Five, six.
‘How do you know? I thought the point of the muscle relaxants and the anaesthetic was to make sure that whatever happens, it’s confined to the brain.’
‘There are small signs. And I’m not seeing any of them. I can tell you now, the machine’s working fine, but it’s not having an effect.’
The ten seconds are up. He removes the electrodes. There is still no movement from Bethany, not even the curl of toes that I saw when I watched this before, like bracken unfurling. In the distance, a phone rings.
‘Can you do it again?’ I whisper. ‘And give her longer?’
He presses his lips together in a line of disapproval. ‘Unsafe to do it twice in one day.’
‘You said her brain’s built up a resistance. There must be variations anyway. Aren’t there?’
He looks annoyed. ‘I’ll wait for her to come round and then I’ll make a decision.’
Within two minutes, Bethany’s eyes have flickered open. I remove her mask. It leaves a faint red suction mark around her mouth, like the unhappy grimace of a clown. ‘Didn’t fucking work,’ she slurs through the rubber mouth-guard. The muscles of her face have gone slack and distorted, and she’s sweating. Even her hair looks greasier, as though the volts have somehow ravaged her, and spooled her life through years rather than seconds. She spits out the guard. ‘Give me more of it, you fuckwit. A proper shot this time. Give me thirty seconds.’
He blinks and addresses his answer to me. ‘I’ll give her twenty,’ he says, rolling up his sleeves, picking up the mouth-guard, and wiping the saliva off it with a paper towel. As he does so I notice the puncture marks on his arms. The stark fact of his addiction, which should have been obvious to me from the start, now shoulders its way into the equation.
‘Twenty’s not enough,’ Bethany protests, as she succumbs to the anaesthetic. ‘What kind of doctor are you anyway?’
He plugs her mouth with the rubber guard and she is silenced.
‘One who’s worried about being struck off?’ I suggest to him, when her eyes have closed.
His smile is dry. ‘Too late for that. I lost my licence to practise a year ago.’
I should have worked that out too. ‘You’d better tell me why.’
‘Sure,’ he says, checking the dials on the metal box. ‘I killed someone.’
Oh Christ. ‘With a machine like this?’
He considers. ‘Nope. A more up-to-date version.’
‘Performing this procedure?’ I can hear the panic in my voice, the shrillness.
He looks at me. ‘I can’t imagine what other procedure you’d perform with it. Yes. But I’m not prepared to do that again. I won’t go over twenty seconds. I made that clear from the start.’ And if it’s not enough? What then? ‘Want me to stop?’
‘No,’ I say, detesting us both for it. ‘You’re here now. Just get it over with.’
He presses the switch and we both hold our breath. Only a slight twitch of Bethany’s toes indicates that anything has happened, until at the end of twenty seconds a tiny noise escapes from her: a high sigh like the start of a groan.
‘Do you think it’s worked this time?’
He stands up, checks his mobile and pats his pockets, then heads for the door. ‘I’m not staying to find out.’
‘Stop,’ I tell him. ‘Look. I don’t know your name. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve never met you. This equipment isn’t traceable to you. If it hasn’t worked, can’t you try again?’
‘I don’t think you heard me the first time,’ he says from the doorway. ‘I told you. I killed someone. I have to live with that. But I don’t have to repeat it.’
‘Please, can’t you even wait till—’ But he has left the room. I know there’s no point chasing after him, that he has made up his mind, that this was the deal he struck with Ned or, more simply and more importantly, with himself.
After five minutes, with the sound of the medic’s car starting in the background, Bethany’s eyes flicker open and I remove the mask from her face and let her spit the guard into my hand. I pass her a glass of water which she gulps down sloppily. She looks even more destroyed than before. It’s almost obscene.
‘Hi, Bethany.’
She looks at me fuzzily and speaks from the side of her mouth. ‘Hi, Wheels. It didn’t work.’
The disappointment is like a strong, ugly taste. ‘He’s gone.’
‘Why?’ Her lower lip seems to be in spasm.
‘He had reasons I couldn’t argue with.’
I find the others assembled in the kitchen, deep in gloomy discussion.
‘Harish Modak rang,’ says Frazer Melville, looking up. ‘He’s on his way.’
A vile heat flashes through me. ‘So what do we do now?’
He shrugs. ‘I don’t know.’
Our eyes meet. But I cannot bear it. My failure has left me with a weariness that presses on my shoulders, turning me into a yoked beast dragged in endless circles, its hooves clogged with earth. Sensing my misery, Frazer Melville touches my arm in sympathy but, feeling me stiffen, he withdraws his hand.
‘Let’s talk to Bethany,’ I suggest. ‘Maybe some of it got through.’
Wordlessly, the others follow me back to the small parlour where she is sprawled on the settee inspecting her blistered hands, the long bandage unwound and strewn around her on the floor like a giant strand of fettuccine.
‘He could see I could take more but the fucker wimped out!’ she rails. ‘And you let him go! I told you, Wheels. I need thirty seconds. If I’d had that long it would’ve worked.’
‘You’re sure you didn’t see anything?’
‘You know I didn’t!’ she explodes. ‘Because I didn’t get enough volts!’
‘There’s nothing we can do now,’ I say. I feel flattened and helpless and oddly distanced from my own body. I could be watching myself from the far wall.
‘Of course there is,’ she says, lifting herself higher on her elbow and wincing from the pain. ‘How dumb are you guys? Look, we’ve still got the machine. You know how to operate it. So go for it.’
Kristin Jons dottir’s eyes widen, and Frazer Melville shoots me an uneasy glance. Ned blinks rapidly and strokes his stubble.
‘You must be joking, Bethany,’ Frazer Melville blurts. ‘It could kill you.’
‘It won’t. Go on,’ she says, jerking her head woozily in the direction of the little machine. ‘A four-year-old could work that thing. So can Wheels here. So can any of you. Just do it. I need thirty seconds. The professor guy’s on his way, right? So do it now. While you dare. Don’t think about it, just do it.’
Kristin takes a step back. She seems suddenly smaller, as though ready to shrivel her way out of the room. Frazer Melville stands motionless. He opens his mouth to say something, looks at me questioningly, then closes it again. I know what he’s thinking.
I say, ‘No.’
‘Jesus!’ spits Bethany. ‘You fucking coward. If you can’t do it for me, then do it for the sake of all those people you think are worth saving, you dumb cow!’
I stare at the dials on the machine, then at her. She is quivering with rage. I ask, ‘Do you think they’re worth saving? Would you risk your life for them?’
‘You’re such an idiot. It’s not about other people. It’s about me. And my life’s fucked anyway. So just do it.’
‘Assisted suicide? No thanks.’
‘OK,’ she sighs heavily. ‘Let’s tell Wheels what she wants to hear. I love life. Can’t get enough of it. I want to celebrate this glorious fucking world. A certain spaz has made me see just how mind-blowingly wonderful it is, with her miracle psychobabble. I can’t wait to see the future. Bring it on. Just do it, for fuck’s sake. It’s my final wish, OK?’
And before I can think, she has shoved back the mouth-guard, reached out shakily for the face-mask, applied it to her nose and mouth and administered a pump of gas. ‘Do it now,’ she says, groggily, her eyes sliding shut. ‘Or I’ll never forgive you.’
You may not be alive to, I think. I am so terrified I could puke. Ned Rappaport, Frazer Melville and Kristin Jons dottir are staring at me aghast. Outside, there’s the sound of a car approaching.
‘That’ll be Harish. I’ll go,’ murmurs Kristin Jons dottir. Noiselessly, she slips out.
People used to tell me I spent too much time thinking, analysing, reflecting, hunting for hidden meanings when perhaps there just weren’t any. When something huge is at stake, something so big its sheer size could blind you, you can’t waste time speculating. Sometimes, you just have to take a leap in the dark.
A big, ignorant leap. To a new place where nothing is the same.
It could be the worst choice I ever make, but in that instant, it’s done. Swiftly, I wipe Bethany’s forehead with the sponge, grab the electrodes, flick on the timer, apply them to her temples, and shift the switch. I hold my breath as the clock ticks and the electricity floods her brain.
Cold, factual thoughts take hold.
I must not pass out from fear.
If she dies, they’ll call it murder.
They will be right to.
I keep the electrodes clamped to her temples and watch the seconds pass.
There’s an uncanny silence. Bethany’s face is so impassive she could be dead. The longest ten seconds of my life pass, but nothing terrible is happening. Then twenty. Twenty-five. Twenty-six. Twenty-seven. Still no movement from Bethany, no sign that the current is having an effect. How should I interpret this? What am I looking for? I don’t even know. I won’t breathe till it’s over. Twenty-eight. I hear Ned gulp. Cuando te tengo a ti vida, cuanto te quiera. Frazer Melville puts a hand on my shoulder and squeezes it. I shuck it off because I loathe myself even more than I loathe him.
Then, at twenty-nine seconds, catastrophe.
With no warning, Bethany’s head jerks up with a violent epileptic spasm and her legs and arms start jerking. The electrode pads crash to the floor, and the mouth-guard goes flying, but the frantic breakdance continues, unstoppable. Frazer Melville shouts to Ned to take her legs, and grapples with her flailing arms. Barely thinking about what I am doing, I heave myself out of the chair, and with immense effort — I can feel the adrenalin whipping through me — I throw myself across her on the settee, pinning her convulsing torso down with my weight. Her head, freed from its strap, butts me in the mouth and I taste blood. She’s still fitting. Despite my weight on top of her, she’s half off the settee. There’s more blood, Bethany’s or mine I can’t tell. I think: she’s bitten off her tongue. Then she flops still.
Ned stands back while Frazer Melville lifts me bodily off her and settles me back into my chair. I am aware of his immense strength. He could be picking up a rag doll.
Bethany, covered in blood, skewed at an awkward angle, is now completely motionless. Her chest was heaving before, but now there is no rise and fall.
The world drops away beneath me.
Kristin appears at the door open-mouthed. With her is Harish Modak.
The old man is frailer in the flesh than in the photographs I have seen: a small, shrunken figure with iron-grey hair and the dark, hooded eyes of a bird of prey. Eyes which flicker across the room, widening as they take in the carnage.
Everywhere is streaked with red. Bethany is twisted oddly, as though she has tried to turn herself inside out. Blood drips from the corner of her lip.
She has stopped breathing.
Harish Modak’s legs buckle as he registers what has happened, and he reaches out to support himself on the door-frame. Kristin grabs his arm and settles him, grey-faced, in a chair by the window.
‘I’ll do mouth-to-mouth and you work her heart,’ I tell Frazer Melville.
‘I’ll count,’ says Ned, hastening over. I take a deep breath, clamp my mouth over Bethany’s and exhale into her lungs.
The next few minutes are a blur. I taste blood and snot. If I can die in her place, I will. I’ll find a way. My life for hers. Bethany, come back. Come back. My lungs are weak with the effort of shoving air into hers. I’m working on her like a machine, all my reflexes kicking in. At one point I pull my head back from Bethany’s mouth and think, this isn’t Bethany any more. It’s Bethany’s dead body. But I carry on forcing air into her lungs anyway, peripherally conscious that Ned has handed over to Kristin Jons dottir, and is now making a phone call.
‘Ambulance,’ he says. ‘Child having convulsions. Yes. Mouth-to-mouth, yes, and—’
‘Sit her up,’ I tell Frazer Melville. With a huge movement, he hauls her up and slings her across his chest so that she’s semi-upright in his arms. Kristin jumps back to make way for him as he topples, then regains his balance. I thought I had been through the darkest times of my life. But I had not counted on this moment. ‘What now?’ Kristin asks in a whisper.
‘This,’ I say. And I slam Bethany on the back with all my force.
There’s no reaction. ‘Gabrielle—’ says Frazer Melville quietly, restraining my arm which is poised for another thump. ‘Gabrielle, can’t you see? It’s too late.’
‘She’s gone,’ says Kristin. ‘She’s dead.’ A low sob escapes her and her face crumples. Harish Modak is sitting completely still, as though mummified.
‘No!’ I free my arm and slam her on the back again. ‘Come back, Bethany!’ As though she can be yelled into life. Which she cannot. ‘Come back!’
Ned, who has been talking urgently into the phone, suddenly stops. He’s staring at me. No. Not at me. At Bethany. I can’t see her face from this angle. But he can.
‘Sorry, false alarm,’ he says quietly into the phone, and snaps it shut.
A groan escapes me. But something odd is happening. Ned’s face has broken into a bewildered, ecstatic smile. I look at Harish Modak: the old man’s expression mirrors Ned’s. Kristin’s grey-green eyes widen, then narrow, and I realise that she’s smiling too. They are all deranged. When Harish Modak speaks, his voice is like a creaky wheel.
‘Well, Miss Bethany Krall,’ he whispers. ‘We meet at last.’
Then Bethany coughs, and my heart flips about like a landed fish.
Quickly, Frazer Melville sets Bethany down, and we both see what Ned, Kristin and Harish Modak saw first: her eyes are open and she’s blinking. She’s alive. From deep in her chest, she draws in a raucous breath and coughs again. A huge red chrysanthemum of blood splats on to the floor.
I burst into tears. Harish Modak comes over to me stiffly, as though hampered by pain. My breathing has become awkward: heaving and uncontrollable. I’m on the edge of hysteria. From the corner of my eye I see that Bethany is shuddering.
‘It’s over now, Miss Fox,’ says Harish Modak. ‘You can relax.’ The voice is hoarse, the Indian accent stronger than I had expected. He is old. Frail. Perhaps also very ill. He may be cynical about Homo sapiens’s use to the Earth’s system, but he is kind. I can tell from the gentleness with which he touches my shoulder. ‘Let us go and clean off this blood. I don’t know exactly what went on in here just now and I don’t think I want to. But the young lady will be OK. Now if you will permit me, Miss Fox, I have brought with me a selection of alcohol and foodstuffs. Let us see if we can improve your morale.’ Frazer Melville turns away from Bethany and comes forward, apparently to accompany us, but Harish Modak puts up a hand. ‘Miss Fox and I will be fine, my boy. You see to Miss Krall here and we will all convene shortly.’
And with an old-world flourish, like a servant waiting on a seated monarch, he positions himself behind my chair, spins me round, and wheels me out of the room.
I’m nursing my second whisky and Harish Modak is installing himself in the living-room, emptying a camel-hide briefcase of various packages which he unwraps and arranges on the coffee table. I’ve returned from a visit to the bathroom where I indulged in a fierce, private bout of crying, the most intense since I lost Max. My blood is calming, but my legs still vibrate with pins and needles, like the flickering of a shoal of tiny electric shrimps — an infuriating reminder that although unresponsive to any demands I make on them, my lower limbs have found a way of registering mental disturbance and causing their own, parallel form of havoc.
‘There we are. Disaster relief,’ says Harish Modak, gesturing at the food. I take in the display of odorous French cheeses, the block of pate de foie gras, the tiny samosas, the box of Belgian chocolates, the bars of Swiss Lindt, the bag of lychees, and the Turkish Delights, and readjust my image of Harish Modak as an ascetic. ‘I will be offended if you refuse.’
‘Then I’ll have a cafe cognac truffle,’ I say, helping myself from the box. ‘Followed by another.’ I discover I am starving. A sugar rush would be just the ticket right now.
‘How do you feel?’
I’m wondering whether he heard me crying in the bathroom, and if he did, whether it matters. ‘It’s normally my job to ask that kind of question. Or it was until recently. I feel like asking you how you feel. As Bethany keeps reminding me, it’s what I do. It’s how I get to know people. I know no other way.’
‘Fair enough,’ he says, returning my smile. The chocolate is working, warming and cosseting me from within. ‘Fair enough. I am fond of that expression, aren’t you? So even-handedly British!’
‘So how do you feel?’
‘Now, specifically?’ he asks. I nod. Amused, he applies his mind to the question, his brow furrowing slightly. ‘If we’re discussing the current situation, I would say: alarmed and fascinated. But cautious.’
‘And more generally?’
‘Aha, a larger question. Are we talking about the world?’
‘I can’t think of a more pressing matter right now.’
‘Alarmed and fascinated again. But more than that, I feel cheated not being able to see fifty years ahead,’ he says, settling in a straight-backed armchair. He moves in the manner of those afflicted with chronic rheumatic pain. ‘I would like more than anything to see the future. I would like to see in what way life develops.’
‘That’s quite a claim, coming from a leading proponent of the idea that it isn’t going to,’ I say, taking another gulp of whisky and letting the glow spread through my ribcage.
‘Not for most humans, in all probability. But the collapse of Homo sapiens as a dominant species means the dawn of a new era for a million other life forms. These interest me.’ If this is the man’s small talk, I wonder what his big talk is like. From the breast pocket of his jacket, he reaches for a horn-handled pocket-knife, opens it up and pares himself a inodest wedge of Pyrenean goat’s cheese. ‘We’ve been here a mere instant, in geological terms,’ he says, inspecting it as he might a slice of brain on a slide. ‘My wife was one of the leading experts on the end-Permian. Back then, life on the planet was nearly wiped out altogether. But within an era or two, it had regenerated most efficiently.’ He pours himself a whisky and gives it an amber swirl. ‘Millions of years ago, a reptilian ancestor of the pig, Lystrosaurus, was the king of the hill. A catastrophe species, like fungi. Perfect for the aftermath of a high-stress event because they thrive on decaying organic matter. Two hundred and fifty-one million years ago, fungi had an orgy. So did the hagfish. Arguably the ugliest creature of the sea, but a successful scavenger.’
‘The point being?’
His smile is an unwilling one, as though wrought against his better judgment. The shadowed eyes glint like ancient marbles. ‘That in terms of the life of this planet, blink and you will miss Homo sapiens altogether. We’ll be an irrelevance.’ Having uttered it, the notion seems to please him. He cuts himself a second slice of cheese and slots it into his mouth.
‘We weren’t sure you would come.’
The hooded eyes edge sideways. ‘Nor was I.’
His discomfort suggests that the decision came from an urge born somewhere in the complex substrata of his psyche, an urge he cannot or will not name. I won’t insist. It will emerge on its own or not at all. ‘And now that you’re here?’
He points the tip of the pocket-knife at me. ‘I have seen with my own eyes the dramatic seriousness with which you take this interesting child. One cannot be unimpressed. I only hope that the experiment has paid off.’
‘But if Bethany comes up with something definitive…’
‘I came here on the understanding that she already had.’
‘It doesn’t change my question. How will you respond?’
‘I will consider crossing the bridge when I have seen what kind of bridge it is. And have judged whether it is crossable.’ from somewhere else in the house, we can hear Ned loudly cajoling Bethany. She tells him to leave her the fuck alone. A doubt is hatching. Why is Modak really here? Ned hinted that even if convinced, it might prove hard to persuade him to do anything. He mentioned his curiosity. Could it be that alone which has brought him here? If so, how far will it take him? If he proves stubborn, what leverage is there?
‘What was Meera like?’ I ask. His response is a defensive, troubled glance. ‘You were married a long time. You must miss her.’
‘May I ask you something, as a psychologist?’ His tone is still playful but I sense a shift. I nod. ‘She wanted her ashes to be thrown in the Ganges but I kept some aside because when the urn arrived back from the crematorium, I had the strangest urge to eat them.’ Ah. The mud has finally stirred. I wait for more. ‘Is the ingestion of one’s other half a known syndrome?’
‘I’ve read some of the literature on it. It’s a surprisingly common urge.’
‘Do you regard it as a form of cannibalism?’
‘Do you?’
‘My internal jury is still out on that one.’
‘It’s not a crime to want her with you. I imagine it’s a comfort. A way of being one flesh, even after death. So. You followed the urge.’
He smiles, revealing teeth the colour of old piano keys. ‘Dr Melville told me you were good.’ I flush. He reaches into the leather briefcase and pulls out a small jamjar of granular ash which he holds up with reverence. Then he grins. ‘Essence of Meera.’
I have a sudden, avid urge to discover whether he sprinkles her on his food condiment-style or swallows her like medicine, but diplomacy is called for.
‘I imagine she was a formidable woman.’
‘Like me, she believed that our only afterlife is an organic one. I’m not afraid of death myself. Of the change of matter, animal to mineral. You are not at my age.’
‘So you have achieved all you wanted to?’
‘I came to certain conclusions about our species and its fate. Conclusions to which most people chose not to listen.’
‘You spawned a whole movement. With self-sufficient settlements all over the world. I get the impression a lot of people listened.’
‘Not hard enough.’ His old mouth forms a rigid line, like a turtle’s.
‘You and Meera didn’t have children. I imagine that was a private response.’
‘Why create hostages to a future whose shape one could so clearly see? The decision was to avoid grief. For oneself but also for others.’ From habit, I note the telling use of ‘one’ instead of ‘I’ or ‘we’, and store the observation. ‘The world is too full. But the childless are always punished. It’s a great irony that one is called selfish for making what is essentially an altruistic choice.’
Since my father’s brain dissolved, I have missed the company of elderly men. But Professor Modak’s presence is causing unsettling questions, rather than a daughterly affinity, to germinate. If, with his blithe nihilism and his jar of edible marital ashes, he truly believes the world will be a better place without humans, and sees time in terms of epochs rather than days and hours, then yes: why should he bother to save a few random millions?
Why on earth?
At the sound of footsteps on the stairs, Harish Modak replaces the jar in his briefcase and turns his head to the door. Bethany enters first, barefoot, followed by the physicist.
‘Hi, Wheels.’
I look Bethany up and down. Our absent host, the expert in chemi-luminescence, is a man of impressive physical proportions, to judge by the size of the towelling bathrobe she is wrapped in. Drowned in its red tartan folds, she settles in a corner of the sofa opposite mine, with her bare feet tucked underneath her. Frazer Melville greets us sombrely, and comments to Harish Modak on the impressive display of food. I can feel him looking at me searchingly, but I have now fully mastered the knack of avoiding his eye. Bethany has been cleaned up and somebody — I guess Ned — has rebandaged her arms and hands. Her face is ashen and her bitten tongue lolls on her lower lip, its tip a chunk of hacked meat.
‘I told her to do it,’ she says, nodding at me but addressing Harish Modak. She emits the words with care, working them past her ruined tongue. ‘I made her give me thirty seconds.’ She sounds proud. Ned and Kristin come in quietly and settle in chairs. All six of us now form a circle around the coffee table opposite the fireplace.
Harish Modak nods. ‘And was it effective, Miss Krall?’
Silence stiffens the air around us. Enjoying the attention of five pairs of adult eyes, Bethany grins, then winces with the pain and sucks in a breath.
‘I was right in the middle of it. It was like being struck by lightning. It was so cool. I got this huge charge.’
Harish’s stillness has an intense, reptilian quality. ‘Take your time. Describe everything.’ Ned is positioning his laptop on a corner of the coffee table to project the rigs on to the whiteboard.
‘It’s like a giant cover being lifted off a bed. Bubbles and stuff are just, like, pouring out from the edges.’ Frazer Melville and Kristin Jons dottir exchange a private glance that rams my guts like a thug’s fist. ‘These stinking bubbles. And it breaks up and there are these huge white sheets just tearing off and shooting up. It goes on and on. As far as you can see. Then there’s fire on the water, the sea’s just, like, glowing in the dark. Yellow and orange. Blue in some places. Just flickering on top of the water.’ She tells it with the lull of a fairytale. ‘Then this giant wave swells up. It’s like a wall in the sky. Higher than the clouds.’
The old man does not move, but I’m aware of embers beginning to glow.
‘We have to know where this happens,’ says Kristin Jons dottir. ‘We have to identify the rig.’
I roll closer to Bethany. ‘The drawing you did. You were underwater and you imagined travelling up the pipe and you saw the platform and the yellow crane. Did you see it again?’ Bethany nods, squints and dabs at the tip of her tongue. When she removes her hand, there’s fresh blood on the bandage that wraps her finger. She spits on the floor, then closes her eyes and lolls her head back. ‘Can you remember the crane? Could you see inside it?’
She sighs and screws up her eyes. A moment passes. ‘There was something. Ouch. It hurts to talk. Something pink. It looked like a
…’ Although her eyes are still closed, it’s clear she’s trying to focus. ‘God. It was a cunt,’ says Bethany. She bursts out laughing. ‘A woman’s cunt! Shaved!’ Her eyes flip open and meet Kristin Jons dottir’s and she smiles lopsidedly, uncertain of what she’s remembered. Then she laughs again, delighted. ‘It was a naked muff! You could see her arsehole too. Ew, gross!’
‘Bethany,’ I say sharply. ‘This is serious. I nearly killed you earlier. There isn’t time for games.’
‘It’s not a game!’ she laughs. ‘I tell you, I saw a vag!’
‘Er, if I know anything about rigs,’ Ned Rappaport intervenes, ‘she may well have done, and there’s actually no mystery.’
Harish Modak looks fleetingly amused. ‘They allow prostitutes? Most enlightened!’
Kristin gives a wan smile. ‘The next best thing,’ she says, tightening the blinds.
A second later the images of the four rigs have reappeared on the wall-screen. The blue of the water in the fourth image is a virulent turquoise but in the others it’s darker.
‘These are the main suspects. They’re all drilling for methane. They’re located off Siberia, Indonesia, in the North Sea and in the Caribbean south of Florida,’ says Ned. ‘We’ve ruled out the rest for various reasons to do with their operational mode. These four all have yellow cranes.’
‘These are good-quality pictures,’ comments Harish Modak, looking quizzical. ‘Better than anything from a satellite.’
‘The sort of thing spies kill each other for,’ murmurs Ned, adjusting the focus, clearly pleased that Harish has noticed. ‘They’re from the military.’ He clicks and three of the rigs disappear. ‘This is the Siberian one. Endgame Beta,’ he says, zooming in first on the spire of the derrick, and then the yellow crane, which is perched to one side of the rig.
‘Go in closer,’ commands Bethany. We’re suddenly confronted by the broad, spilling stomach of a middle-aged man sitting at the controls of the crane’s cabin. His mouth hangs open, as if he is singing or yawning. He has no idea he has been caught on camera.
‘See anything you recognise now, Bethany?’ asks Ned. ‘This bloke here? Anything familiar?’
Bethany shrugs and points at the family photographs on the wall of the man’s cabin. ‘No intimate flesh. No pew-denda. I’d say Mr Clean from Siberia is sitting in a fanny-free zone.’
Ned moves to the next image: nothing. On the next, Lost World in the Caribbean, the crane is unmanned — but on the inside wall of the cabin, to the left of the joystick and controls, is a rectangle of pink. Ned tightens the picture and adjusts the focus. Then, too suddenly, the slur of flesh has taken on silhouette and texture and we’re staring at a pair of hugely swollen breasts with dark, saucer-like nipples. Perched above them, the smiling face of their brunette owner.
‘Pass the sick-bag!’ Bethany guffaws. Ned scrolls down the image but it stops just north of the jewel-studded belly-button.
‘No mons Venus. So shall we rule out Miss November in the Caribbean,’ says Ned drily, ‘and move on?’
In the next image, the windscreen of the manned crane has sunlight on it, making it hard, initially, to distinguish much beyond the outline of the operator’s head. But Bethany is pointing excitedly.
‘Let’s see the top right. Behind his left shoulder and up a bit.’ The fair-haired man is lifting a can of Dr Pepper to his lips with a gloved hand. ‘Higher,’ commands Bethany. Something pink and glistening comes into lurid focus. Ned pulls out until the entire girl materialises. She is Chinese.
Her legs are spread wide.
Between them, a slick, meaty confusion.
‘That’s the one,’ says Bethany, non-committally. She seems to have lost interest.
Ned flicks the screen off, engulfing us again in the room’s gloom. When he speaks, his voice is constricted. ‘It’s Buried Hope Alpha.’
‘Christ,’ says Kristin Jons dottir. ‘It’s in the North Sea. A hundred kilometres off the coast of Norway.’
‘Norway,’ repeats Harish Modak. He breathes in deeply and exhales in silence. I think: mountains. Cruises in fjords. But then stumble, stuck. Looking bored, Bethany rummages about in the chocolates, mews in disgust at the cheese, and settles for a lychee.
‘Buried Hope Alpha belongs to Traxorac,’ says Ned. The colour has abandoned his face, making his dark stubble stand out. He has a haunted look. It strikes me that he feels as lonely as I do.
‘Can you get the exact co-ordinates?’ asks Frazer Melville. Kristin Jons dottir is biting her lip.
After a false start, a geological map fills the screen: a huddle of thin concentric rings intersected with lines of latitude and longitude, with a small red dot indicating what I assume is the rig. Bethany is now yawning widely, frustrated at no longer being the centre of attention.
‘I see. Well, this is not good,’ says Harish Modak. He has become as sombre as the others.
‘I told you,’ says Bethany casually. We all look at her. ‘I kept saying it was close. I told you we’d be drowned. I said all along. But no one listened. Story of my fucking life.’
‘Can someone explain?’ I ask.
Frazer Melville removes his exhausted face from his hands. ‘Have you heard of the Storegga Slide?’ I shake my head, still unable to look at him directly. It’s all too raw, too agonising. I want to leave this place and never come back. ‘It’s a massive package of sand and mud off the continental shelf that stretches for eight hundred kilometres, from Norway to Greenland. It’s the result of the biggest submarine upheaval we know of, eight thousand years ago. It generated a huge tsunami that washed over most of the British Isles. This rig is sited on the edge of Storegga.’
But somehow, he can’t continue.
If I loved him I would feel sorry for him. I would want to take him in my arms and kiss his cheekbone. I glance at Kristin Jons dottir. She seems too busy with her own reactions to be concerned with his. Her delicate eyes have become glassy and perturbed.
Harish Modak clears his throat and takes over. ‘It seems, Miss Fox, that we are faced with the interesting prospect of a disaster which will begin very, er… locally. A huge underwater collapse anywhere in the Storegga region will cause a tsunami that will devastate the entire area. Norway’s coastline is the closest to Storegga but the sediment package will push the water into the basin in the other direction to begin with, projecting it faster east than west. Making your country the first to be hit. It will be amplified in the river estuaries and in the funnel of German Bight.’ There’s a gape of quiet, as though the air’s molecules have squeezed into a new shape and sucked out noise. ‘Norway and Denmark will be hit next, and the rest of northern Europe. The tsunami will certainly reach Iceland, and if it’s big enough, the United States.’
‘And the date?’ asks Frazer Melville. His breathing is ragged. ‘Bethany, are you still sure about the date?’
‘The coming of the dragon and the false prophet! The battle of Armageddon!’ Bethany chortles, peeling off the shell of a lychee.
‘Bethany,’ I say. My throat is bunching up. ‘You said October the twelfth.’
She is rummaging around in her tartan robe for a piece of lychee shell, dropped during the peeling process. ‘Did I? I don’t know. Maybe before. There’s a thunderstorm. It’s after that. But this thing’s different from everything else.’ She fishes out the piece of shell and flicks it across the room, then returns her attention to the fruit.
‘Miss Krall has been correct before,’ says Harish Modak, watching Bethany intently. ‘For the sake of argument we should perhaps assume that she is correct again.’
‘Too right you should. You know,’ Bethany murmurs, holding up the pearly orb of her lychee to the light, ‘these things look like eyeballs.’
For a long time there is a pensive silence, broken only by Bethany’s tuneless humming. It’s Kristin who breaks it. ‘Harish, it’s the tenth. You must help us.’
He turns to her as if in pain. ‘Must? Must is an interesting word. It belongs with should and ought. I do not trust it.’ Bethany looks interested.
Kristin flares. ‘You mean you came all this way—’
‘My dear Kristin. You know me well. So you know the question I shall ask. The same question I have spent half my life asking. To what end?’ Kristin shoots a hopeless look first at Frazer Melville, then at me. Harish smiles. Bethany is nodding perkily, as though egging him on. ‘To what possible end, when the world that remains beyond this disaster will be unrecognisable?’
‘Have you heard of moral duty?’ Ned speaks calmly enough, but he looks ready for violence. ‘Have you heard of non-assistance to people in danger?’ He gets to his feet and starts pacing the room, stroking at his stubble.
‘Speaking personally, I would always prefer to know my options,’ says Frazer Melville. ‘So that I could make my own choices. We don’t have the right to deny that to others.’
Harish Modak does not look impressed. ‘I am glad to be this old,’ he says, sighing. ‘I would hate to be young.’
‘It completely fucking sucks,’ agrees Bethany, sticking her finger in her ear and tilting her head back carefully, as though it contains liquid that might spill.
‘Harish,’ I say. He swivels his head and frowns.
‘My dear Miss Fox.’
‘Whatever the future’s like for most people, it’s going to be even harder for me. But I don’t want to die. I want to live.’ I sound more sure of this than I feel.
‘There is living and there is surviving.’
‘Are we back to the avoidance of grief?’ I notice Kristin stiffening.
‘In a way, we are,’ says Modak. ‘And is there anything wrong with that?’ The decision was to avoid grief. For oneself but also for others.
I turn to Kristin. ‘You knew Meera well. What would she say now, do you think?’
Modak looks stung at the mention of his wife’s name. Good. If Meera is forbidden territory, then trespassing will have an effect.
‘I tell you what she’d say, Gabrielle,’ says Kristin. She’s addressing me but her words are for him. ‘She’d be ashamed to hear her husband talking like this.’ Modak’s face tightens and he lets out an exasperated noise. ‘She didn’t see the world the way Harish does. She never did. She sacrificed too much for him.’ His eyelids close to shut her out. But she won’t stop. ‘She wanted children. But you wouldn’t agree, would you, Harish? She’d have risked grief, for the sake of some kind of future. If she were here now she would tell you that if it’s the last thing you do—’
Kristin breaks off and looks away, too furious to go on.
‘I agree with Professor M here,’ grins Bethany. ‘The world sucks. Humans suck. We don’t deserve to live. None of us. Let something else take over the planet. Some kind of scorpion or whatever it’s going to be. Toadstools. Hyenas. Those glow-in-the-dark creepy-crawlies. So what if a load of idiots get swept away.’
‘That is not what I am saying, Miss Krall,’ he says, standing up, his fists clenched. ‘You are misrepresenting me.’
‘How?’
‘In every way possible.’
‘You don’t agree then?’
‘The present universe has undergone innumerable deaths and rebirths.’
I grab his clenched hand, pull him down next to me and force him to look at me. I want him to witness my fury. ‘Whatever you feel about the Great Cycle and Gaia and the futility of the species is irrelevant, Harish! The issue is about the people who are alive now, who will die if you don’t help us warn them!’ He wants his hand back but I won’t let go. ‘Look at me. I felt like a murderer after Istanbul. So did Frazer. If we fail to act now, none of us is any better than any war criminal on trial in The Hague. Most of all you, because you’re the one with the power to do something.’
Kristin moves over and stands behind him, resting her fingers lightly on his shoulder.
Abruptly, Ned leaps up, grabs the tray and heads for a side-cupboard. He returns with six glasses and unscrews the Laph-roaig.
‘We all are. Let’s drink to your health, Harish. And your moral courage.’
‘But I haven’t—’ Harish begins.
‘Yes you have,’ I say. ‘And we salute you for it.’
He draws away from me and stands up. We’re all looking at him. He sighs. As though drained of energy by the conflict, he sits down again with a small hard thud.
‘I will say one thing to all of you. And I will say it to anyone thinking beyond this disaster. Be careful what you wish for.’ Then, blinking, he reaches for the jar in his briefcase. It is too intimate. I look away.
Determined to keep the momentum of Harish’s forced decision, Ned clinks glasses and proposes a further toast to Bethany. ‘A Coke for you, Bethany? Fruit juice?’
It might be the first time in her entire life that anyone has proposed a toast in her honour, but she shakes her head sullenly. The look on her face, as she rolls another lychee between her fingers, disturbs me. She is working up to something.
‘If my wife were here, she would remind us that there’s a common misconception about the Chinese character that represents the word "crisis",’ says Harish Modak, sipping his whisky. With the inoral decisions behind him, he seems to be rallying.
‘Crisis equals danger plus opportunity,’ says Frazer Melville.
‘So Western business gurus and life coaches would have you believe. They’ll show you how the strokes break down, and say: look. Danger and opportunity. But the Chinese will tell you that is in fact a myth.’
‘The moral being?’
‘That a crisis is simply a crisis, nothing more and nothing less.’
‘For Traxorac, this is going to be about pride, self-image, about face,’ I say, thinking aloud. ‘We’re dealing with the emotions of institutions, with herd psychology. And herds are unwieldy and tumultuous, they have mood swings, they go through phases in their thinking, they get idées fixes.’
‘No one likes to admit they screwed up,’ agrees Ned. ‘But it will apply to governments too.’
‘Our job is to warn the maximum number of people in the most efficient and convincing way about what’s coming, whether or not Traxorac admit the danger, and whether or not the authorities listen,’ says Kristin Jons dottir. If I didn’t hate her I would like her. And I hate her for not letting me like her. ‘I’ll bet that once they recognise it’s happening, they’ll be more preoccupied first with a cover-up and then with looking for a scapegoat than in tackling the logistics.’
‘She’s right,’ says Ned, reaching for a notepad. ‘I’ve seen it from the inside. The first instinct will be denial, but then they’ll flip into blame mode.’ He is jotting something down.
‘If a horizontal crack’s forming, and loosening the sediment package where they’ve been drilling, there will be proof of it somewhere,’ says Frazer Melville, taking a slug of whisky.
‘Yes. One piece of evidence would do it,’ says Kristin. ‘If it were uncontestable. If it’s visible anywhere, it’ll be in Traxorac’s latest seismic logs of the drill-site. If you compare them over time, and there’s a discrepancy, it means there’s been movement. That would be proof.’
‘Harish,’ says Ned bluntly, looking up from his note-making. ‘We’ll be needing your clout there too.’
‘I feel a thousand years old.’
‘Once we have the logs, we hold a press conference and present the facts and the public can make its own decision. Which is what we owe them. Then we get somewhere safe, fast.’
‘Who’s we?’ says Bethany. The room goes still. ‘I said who the fuck is we?’
With a huge effort, she tries to stand up. But it’s too soon: she’s weak. She sways on her feet, and looks ready to topple. ‘You listen to me, fuckwits.’ She seizes hold of the sofa arm and manages to right herself. Frazer Melville moves to help her but she shakes him off. She has our attention. ‘I’m the one who saw it happening. So don’t even fucking think about handing me back to those wankers at Oxsmith. Or Kiddup Manor. You know what’ll happen there.’ No one speaks. Ned shifts uncomfortably. ‘Well?’ she accuses. ‘Well, Professor M? Ned? Frazer? Kristin? Wheels? Are you going to dump me now you’ve got what you need?’ Her eyes are having trouble focusing. Spotting it, Frazer Melville pulls her firmly back down to the sofa. ‘Flush me down the fucking toilet, you arseholes? Is that your plan?’
‘We’re obviously a team,’ begins Ned hesitantly. But he can’t follow it through. Being more pragmatist than diplomat, he’s thinking the obvious thought. She’s a loose cannon. A danger to herself and others. A mad girl. A liability. The police are looking for her. There is no way she can be involved. Kristin is eyeing Bethany with a mixture of dismay and profound distaste. The physicist is inspecting his hands.
‘Wheels,’ says Bethany. Her eyes are glittering and her mouth has turned down at the edges. I feel a faint, high buzzing in my ears, like a pressure-change on an aeroplane.
When I swivel to face the others, an ache spreads across my shoulders, pressing me down. I shift and straighten.
‘This is also a moral decision.’
The éminence grise sighs wearily. The others look uneasy.
Modak says, ‘They seem to keep coming.’
‘Yes, Professor My’ snarls Bethany. Angry tears are tracking down her face. ‘And you’re supposed to be good at them. Your reputation’s kind of based on that idea, right? I Googled you.’
Harish Modak closes his eyelids and exhales quietly. ‘I had not expected quite so much pressure to be exerted on me today, concerning my status in the world,’ he murmurs. ‘But one must be consistent, I suppose.’ I breathe out. I had not expected this much relief. He opens his eyes and scrutinises me. ‘As for your role in this, Miss Fox…’
I shrug. ‘You don’t stop doing your job just because someone fires you. I’m doing my job.’
Ned shifts in his seat, but says nothing.
I think: I am doing my job because Bethany is my job.
And Bethany is all I have left.
Having established the principle of her freedom, the human hand grenade disappears into the next room to watch TV, while the others begin an intense technical discussion, orchestrated by Ned. The first priority, he says, is to obtain Traxorac’s seismic data; the second, to ensure that the warning they issue at the press conference reaches the maximum audience. ‘I have a stunt lined up involving the marine biologist mate whose house we’re in, and a team of his in Greenland. But in the meantime…’ He clicks the laptop to reveal a screen filled with eight columns of bullet points over a map of the North Sea. ‘Here’s the way forward as I see it.’ I understand why Frazer Melville recruited him. He is a strategy machine. But there’s an item he has not yet factored in. While Harish Modak stops Ned with a question about the tonnage of Buried Hope Alpha and Frazer Melville and Kristin Jons dottir reach for their notepads, I leave the room unnoticed and roll down the corridor.
Huge and sombre, the farillhouse kitchen has low beams and a dark oakwood table, varnished to a high gloss. On it sits an open laptop. I set the kettle to boil on the range, locate teabags, cups and milk, boot up, and check the news online. Sure enough, the story I have been dreading ever since the phone call from Kavanagh is one of the main headlines.
Teen abduction: disabled therapist suspected. I flush with irritation at the word disabled. As I read on, the flush spreads. The hunt for the teenager abducted from a hospital ward last Wednesday has intensified following the disappearance of her former therapist, Gabrielle Fox, who now joins Dr Frazer Melville, a research physicist, as a prime suspect in the case.
The photo is unflattering, and doubtless chosen to suit the story: it shows me looking vengeful. I recognise the occasion from the shapeless outfit I’m wearing, an unhappy hybrid of tracksuit and dress. They held a small party when I left the Unit in Hammersmith. It was Dr Sulieman’s idea. Perhaps he thought it would cheer me up. But it didn’t. I got drunk, and someone had to ring for a taxi. The image of the physicist is smaller: an anodyne corporate shot in black and white. The BBC Online article, which describes us, mortifyingly, as ‘the couple’, continues with a quote from Leonard Krall, demanding the immediate return of his estranged daughter, for her own safety and that of others. This is followed by a statement from Detective Kavanagh, another from an Oxsmith spokeswoman, and a defensive comment from the senior administrator of St Swithin’s hospital. Joy McConey is quoted only towards the end of the article. ‘There’s something I believe that her kidnappers haven’t understood. Bethany Krall is damaged, dangerous and very angry.’ I picture her homeopathically pale eyes. ‘She has killed before. She’s quite capable of killing again. Whoever is sheltering her should know that unless she is safely contained, lives are at risk. The best way to help Bethany is to return her safely to the professionals.’
I presume that the BBC, along with the main news agencies, will not run its interview with Joy in full because it has a reputation to maintain. But the rest of the net is free of such scruples. Within a few clicks, I have located a video clip of Joy McConey, extracted from a longer interview. I turn up the volume and press play. She has worked hard on herself since our meeting in the playground. Gone is the combat gear. Her pale red wig is coiffed into a feminine chignon, while discreet make-up and a sombre business suit provide a professional gravitas she must be credited for mustering at such short notice.
‘When she was an inmate at Oxsmith, Bethany Krall foresaw several disasters which all then happened on the exact dates she predicted,’ she says. I remember Joy’s voice when she called me on the phone, shrieking at her husband while he battled to restrain her. Now, levelly and reasonably, she runs through the list of catastrophes Bethany foresaw, starting with Mount Etna a year ago, and ending with the Istanbul quake. ‘My biggest concern isn’t that Bethany Krall can predict events like these.’ She pauses to emphasise her point. ‘It’s that she’s somehow able to cause them. I don’t say this lightly. I myself have personal proof of how powerful the forces within her are. When I contracted cancer two months ago…’
The kettle is boiling but I have given up on tea. I pause the clip and hurtle back to the others.
‘Right, this’ll mean a change of plan,’ says Ned, when I have conveyed the news, to which he and the others listened with evident alarm, though if any of them now regrets the decision to allow Bethany to stay with us the cavil is not voiced. ‘Gabrielle.Instead of coming with us to London, you, Frazer and Bethany will need to stay here. We can’t risk you being seen. After the press conference, we’ll collect you by helicopter.’ He flips open his phone and punches in a number. ‘But I’ll organise alternative transport for you, just in case.’ He looks at his watch, sandwiching his mobile between cheek and shoulder. ‘Kristin, Harish: we’ll need to leave here within the next couple of hours. Hi, Jerry. Ned again. Another car, untraceable… yes, today.’
I glance at Frazer Melville, the man who showed me a new world, then smashed it. If the morose expression on his face is related to the sudden prospect of staying here with me and Bethany, instead of going to London with his lover and the others to warn the world about the catastrophe on the horizon, then I share his gloom.
The others have left, and it is late. Frazer Melville has prepared a Marks and Spencer’s ready-meal, which we eat in the kitchen around the oak table, largely in silence. The food sticks in my throat. Even Bethany is subdued.
‘I’ll be sleeping on the sofa in the living-room,’ I say, when Bethany has left the kitchen, announcing that she is going to bed.
‘We need to talk,’ says the physicist.
‘There’s nothing to say. I’ll clear the dishes, if you check on Bethany and lock the doors.’
By the time he returns, fifteen minutes later, I have settled on the sofa with a blanket over me. Like a coward, I am faking sleep because I cannot face him. I’m too tired and too forlorn and I know that the conversation we will have will make me feel even worse than I already do. I’m aware of him coming in, approaching the sofa and squatting next to me. I stay immobile. He kisses my forehead and I feel a huge wave of sadness.
He whispers, ‘Gabrielle. I know you’re awake. Please stop being angry. You have to forgive me. We have to talk again. We have to move on.’
But I don’t shift.
I long for him to kiss me again, to touch me. But he doesn’t.
Instead, he sits a little longer, then gets heavily to his feet, and leaves the room. What is he feeling? Pity, guilt, remorse?
A moment later I hear his tread on the stairs and then the murmur of him talking on the phone. He must miss her, because it’s a long conversation.
Unlike lovers who betray, those who die remain forever constant. If I could erect a No Trespassing notice to prevent Alex creeping into my dreams at night, I would do it. Whenever he infiltrates, I awake with reluctance, knowing that surviving the day ahead will require an act of faith, a pledge to optimism that I will have trouble summoning. Another hour’s sleep and my perspective might change, but now the dream — an unsettling one in which Alex twisted my hair into bewildering shapes — is too recent for that to be an option. And reality is too penetrating.
‘Come on, Wheels. Let me show you the lake.’ She’s flapping a white towel in my face. Through the blinds, there is already a striped glow of light. Eight o’clock, at a guess. ‘Come on! Get moving! Let’s get some air!’
The day stretches ahead: a day of stress, of waiting for the phone to ring, of avoiding the physicist.
‘Give me five minutes,’ I say, and pull on a T-shirt.
Wheelchairs and mud do not get along well, but there’s a concrete walkway that takes me close to a waterline fringed with reeds. Bethany has run on ahead and is stripping off.
‘What are you doing? Bethany, you’ll freeze!’
‘It’s great!’ she yells, balling up her towel and flinging it at me.
But I understand her urge because suddenly, with a rush of blood to the head, I share it. I, too, would love to strip off my clothes and swim. The sunrise is a delicate tangerine, the air so warm it could still be August. There’s a faint breeze. Gulls and starlings wheel above us and hop about in the mulch. Just a few years ago, being able to swim outdoors in Britain in October would have seemed as outlandish as the arrival of seahorse colonies in the Thames or commercial papaya orchards in Kent. Now, warm autumns are just another in a long list of pill-sweeteners as we descend into the ninth circle.
Bethany has hurled her clothes on to the narrow sloping beach. Naked, she is a pitiful amalgam of skin and bone: thin ribcage, negligible breasts, concave stomach, gaunt thighs studded and criss-crossed with the scars of cuts and cigarette burns, a fuzz of dark hair between. She has abandoned her bandages but the wounds on her hands and arms are still raw.
‘Be careful!’ I call out, but she has plunged into the lake and is prancing about in the shimmering water, oblivious. If it is stinging her, and freezing cold, she doesn’t let it show.
‘Come on in!’ she screams, ecstatic. ‘This is fucking amazing!’
My first instinct is the sane one: to refuse. There are no nurses to restrain Bethany should she attack me, and leaving my chair requires a level of confidence I don’t feel. But having chosen to enter a territory with no rules, I am perversely tempted. I have missed the physical routine of my daily swims: my muscles yearn for movement, for something that edges towards punishment, and the serotonin rush that follows. I’m more mobile and free in the water than anywhere else. And it’s not far to the edge.
Sometimes I think too much. Today I won’t. I lower myself out of my chair and shuffle a few metres along the cool mud to get closer to the gap in the reeds where Bethany entered the water. Near the lake’s edge I discard my skirt, keeping just my T-shirt and knickers. The compressed soil is cold and firm against my palms. When the slope sharpens, I turn sideways and roll, using gravity to propel me. It’s an unexpected, stolen and absurdly sensual feeling. In this moment, the refusal of my legs to cooperate with the rest of my body is forgiven. Irrelevant, even. If the slope were longer, I could roll for ever. I could roll to the edge of the world. When I reach the scummy froth I am shocked by the slap of cold, but don’t let my momentum slow, merging into its chilly suck. Once submerged, I paddle a little way out, then float on my back, working my arms, savouring the harsh bliss of the water. Bethany stands chest-deep, facing the horizon, her arms held high above her, shivering and swaying.
‘And I stood upon the sand, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea,’ she shrieks out to the sky. A seagull swoops past and disappears towards a hulked mass of trees in the far distance. ‘Having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy!’
The lake is soft and benign as amniotic fluid, the creeping daylight seductive as a whisper. The world could amlost feel like a good place. Unexpectedly, the sight of Bethany cavorting in the ripples with the giant wind turbine rotating on the hill beyond provokes a strange, painful wash of tenderness.
You could care about her, and the world we live in.
Perhaps you already do.
I close my eyes and float. After a while Bethany quietens down, bored with herself, and I listen to the sound of birdsong and the rustle of the wind in the reeds. In the distance, a tractor starts up. It’s October 11th, and I would feel anxious, were it not for a vague but persistent feeling that Bethany has got it wrong, and that whatever happens tomorrow — and I do not doubt that something will — cannot affect us here. It’s too unimaginable. This country, with its patchworked farmland, its hills and cliffs and valleys and gorges, its woodlands of oak and birch and beech and pine, its rivers and cattle pastures and bright swathes of hemp and rape: there is no room for catastrophes in such a world. They cannot gain entry.
Dr Sulieman would have a thing or two to say about such fantasies of denial.
Lost in them, I don’t hear Bethany’s approach.
When she speaks, teeth chattering, her voice is right in my ear.
‘I suppose Frazer’ll want to fuck you again, now Kristin’s gone.’ Her tone is conversational. She could be commenting on the weather. I don’t want to open my eyes, but I must, if I am to face whatever comes next. She’s treading water next to me, with only her head visible. On top of it, perched like a fright wig, is a filthy clump of chickweed. ‘So are you going to let him? I guess you can’t be choosy.’ I start working my arms, heading for the lake’s edge. But she doesn’t let up. ‘He’s into tits, isn’t he? Yours are better than Kristin’s, so you’ve got that going for you, Wheels. Shame about the rest.’ I must get away. Not just from Bethany (did I catch myself, just seconds ago, caring about her?)but from everything here. This is no place for an ixgoy. I’ll go back to Hadport, explain the whole thing to Kavanagh. ‘Hey, you didn’t really think Frazer was fucking you for your sake, did you? You didn’t think he was in love with you?’ My arms are aching now, and the chill has penetrated my bones. I battle towards the shore, gulping in water. ‘Why would anyone want to fuck a spaz? I told you!’ she yells. ‘He’s fucking Kristin! You know it! Stop pretending you don’t!’
If I drowned now, I wouldn’t care.
But I don’t. I swim to the edge, fighting back the sobs, while Bethany explodes into ugly, high-pitched laughter and splashes her way to the opposite bank. Scrambling out and grabbing her towel, she runs, stark naked, towards the house.
I drag myself out of the water to the safety of my chair and strip off. Bethany’s cries grow fainter in the distance. You’re being manipulated, Ms Fox, her father said. And you can’t even see it. Now I do. I know she is mad but I still feel betrayed. Just a moment ago, I thought we might have edged into a new realm. My teeth are chattering and there is steam coming off my skin as my heat mingles with the cold air. Laboriously, I towel myself off and squeeze out my wet clothes. Transferring from the ground into my chair is something I mastered long ago, in rehab. But here, with the chair perched at an awkward angle on the concrete platform next to the mud bank, the manoeuvre seems impossible. I fail twice. By the third attempt I am in tears.
N’abandonne pas! says a voice in my head. Whenever I fantasise about Maman, I am eleven again. But I’m not listening to her. Or to my father, who’s here too, not as the man he is, but as the man he was, with his kindness and his gentle jokes and his cultivation. The word that best summed up both him and the things he appreciated in life was ‘civilised’. He is saying, this is not civilised.
No, Dad. And I’m sorry about that. But this is the way things panned out. Lying naked in the mud, I imagine my body dissolving to become a part of the Earth’s crust, my flesh rotting and my bones fossilising to rock.
I hear a shout. Frazer Melville is calling my name. Wearily, I look up. He’s running towards me from the direction of the house. He looks desperate. Trying to summon up some dignity, I haul myself to a sitting position and cover up with the towel.
‘What happened? What did she do? Did she hurt you?’ He squats next to me, panting, and takes hold of my arm.
His hand is on my back. ‘My God, you’re freezing!’
‘Let me go!’ I shuck him off violently.
‘You’ve had a shock. Calm down. It’s OK, I’m here.’ He looks wild with alarm. I draw a line in the mud with my finger, gouging deep. He’d better not cross it.
‘You have to tell me what’s going on!’ he pleads. ‘What are you doing out here? Why are you acting like you hate me?’
‘Because I do hate you!’ And now I need his help to get into my chair and I hate him for that too. He looks astonished, slapped. Confounded. Then horrified.
‘But why? What have I done?’
‘Well, you tell me!’ I lunge for my chair and miss. He repositions it, hauls me up by the arms — I succumb for practical reasons but despise myself for it — and seats me in it. Free to move, I roll back sharply but miscalculate the edge of the concrete platform. The chair tips: catching it just in time he pitches me back.
‘I haven’t done anything!’
‘Yes, right! And I’m supposed to believe that? When I saw you with her?’ I spin on my wheels and propel myself as fast as I can along the walkway. He grabs my chair by a handle and jerks it to a stop, planting himself in front of me at eye level.
‘When you saw me with who?’
‘With Kristin!’
‘Kristin?’
‘In your house. It was evening. You drew the blinds. And the next day you lied and said you’d been at the office.’
‘Yes, Kristin came to my house! I showed her Bethany’s drawings and we talked and that’s all we did. Oh, and I drew the blinds. Which is now obviously one of the classic signs of infidelity!’ he shouts. ‘If you think that, then you’re as crazy as Bethany! I didn’t tell you about her because we realised we’d have to abduct Bethany and I didn’t want you to be part of it. For your sake. I did it for you. How could you think—’
‘I came to see you and there she was and so of course I thought what I thought!’
‘There’s no of course!’
‘There is if you’re me! And Bethany said—’ But I can’t say it. The tears and the rage are in the way.
‘Bethany? You’re trusting her?’ he shouts.
‘We’re both trusting her! It’s why we’re here, remember?’
‘But you believed her? About me and Kristin? Doing what? Having an affair? How could you?’ He is furious. And it’s genuine. ‘How could you insult me like that?’
‘So tell me it’s not true!’ I yell. ‘Go on, I dare you to tell me.’
‘Stop it. Stop this. Look at me. I love you. Can’t you see that, Gabrielle? I love you!’
But I can’t let it go. Not yet. ‘No! I can’t see it, how could I? How could anyone? Look at me! I can’t even feel it when you’re inside me, do you understand? I can’t feel anything down there!’
‘I don’t care! Do you hear me? When we make love I’m making love to all of you! Not just the bit that can’t feel, don’t you get it?’ He’s grabbed me by the shoulder and he’s shaking me. I struggle to free myself but he won’t let go. We grip each other. I am fighting him off even though I feel the truth and I should be ashamed, because my anger is on its own, unstoppable roll and it’s in control of me, roaring its way through until finally the tears burst out and I go limp, and he lifts me up in his arms and kisses my hair and my face and my neck and tells me he doesn’t care, he doesn’t care, he doesn’t care. He would never even look at another woman. He loves me. Every part of me, now and for ever.
Frazer Melville has lit the fire in the hearth, and we are watching the flames throwing shadows across the walls and ceiling. Every now and then a log pops, or some bark bursts open and releases a fizzing drool of sap. I could stare at it endlessly. Earlier, in the downstairs bathroom, I managed to bathe and wash my hair and I let him dry it for me which took a long time because every two minutes he stopped to kiss me and tell me I was a fool. Now, with coffee inside me, and an Indian shawl wrapped around my shoulders, I am finally warming up. After a furious altercation in which I overheard Frazer Melville threaten to return Bethany to the authorities if she ever, ever pulled a stunt like that again, she is keeping a low profile upstairs. But I do not kid myself it springs from remorse.
‘Low self-esteem can wreak the worst kind of havoc,’ I say in conclusion.
‘I never guessed you suffered from it,’ he says sadly. The green shard in his eye flickers and I realise how much I have missed it. And him. ‘I should have. But you’re so sure of yourself. So incredibly sexy.’ He leans in to me and buries his face in my cleavage. ‘I want you all the time. I can’t get enough of you. I want you now.’
I want him too. But I still can’t let go of the cruel truth I met in the lake, the truth I have not articulated before. The truth about the depth of my own insecurity, the intensity of the hurt. The realisation that whatever I may have told myself, I have not even begun to heal.
Frazer Melville is adding more wood to the fire when the phone rings. I pick up. It’s Kristin. If she is surprised at the warmth with which I greet her, she doesn’t let it show. But I feel the need to make amends.
‘I have an apology to make, Kristin. I was rude to you. There was a lot going on and I—’
‘Forget it. It was understandable. But listen.’ She’s speaking in an excited rush. ‘Harish pulled some strings and got hold of the seismic logs from Buried Hope. They have some geophysicists who do some research for them and get the data regularly. I had two other experts study them. They confirm what Bethany said. There’s a horizontal crack beneath the hydrate field which will lead to a huge methane blowout. We don’t know when it developed but it showed up on the data from September so it has been going on for a while. The company must know about it.’
‘So now you can announce the press conference?’
‘Yes. We’re doing a big stunt to publicise it. Keep an eye on the news. By the way, the forecast says we’re in for thunderstorms. They’ll sweep across northern Britain this afternoon, and move south. Can you pass me to Frazer? I need to run something past him.’
Interesting, how easily I can do that now that I know she is not, and has never been, my sex rival. Now that I am free to like and admire her, I find that I do. Intensely. I hand over the phone and she and Frazer Melville begin a technical conversation about the series of graphs that have just appeared on his laptop. While they speak, I pull my wheelchair across and transfer into it. I have not seen Bethany since she ran out of the lake, but if I am to be in any way professional, I must talk to her.
I only wish I felt readier.
When Frazer Melville finishes on the phone, I say, ‘I’d better talk to Bethany. Alone.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I have to.’
‘I’ll make some tea, and get her to come down.’
Ten minutes later Bethany, engulfed in the tartan bathrobe, has flung herself on the sofa opposite me. She’s scowling.
‘I accept your apology,’ I say.
‘I didn’t apologise.’
‘I know. So I offered it on your behalf, and then I accepted it on mine.’
‘How the fuck does that work?’
‘Magic. Don’t knock it.’
‘Harish Modak calls me Miss Krall.’
‘And you like the sound of that?’ She nods. ‘In that case you can stop calling me Wheels and call me Gabrielle. Deal, Miss Krall?’
She blinks, considering, but doesn’t speak. Frazer Melville enters with two cups of tea and places them on the table between us. ‘Lapsang souchong,’ he announces. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’ He closes the door quietly behind him.
There is a silence. Then Bethany says, ‘She used to do that.’
‘Who used to do what?’
‘My mum. She’d bring me a cup of tea.’
I am immediately alert. I misjudged her mood. This is the first time she has mentioned her mother unprompted. She’s on the brink of something.
‘She brought you cups of tea, but what kind of person was she?’ She shrugs and looks away. ‘Something went very wrong between you. What was it like, that evening?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How can’t you know?’
‘You can forget stuff.’
‘Sometimes you need to forget. Because it can make things easier. Like feeling that you’re dead. But the ECT can bring memories to the surface. Perhaps that’s what’s happening. You had a big dose.’
She reaches to bury her fingers in the rug and flexes them. I think of the photo of the Krall family: the handsome father; the girl with a broad smile and braces on her teeth; the mother, a bloodless, ineffectual mouse. When she speaks, her voice is barely audible, carried on her breath like an exhalation.
‘I was never good enough for them.’
‘In what way?’
‘Even when I believed in God, the Bible, Genesis, the whole bag of shit, I wasn’t good enough. So I tried being bad.’
‘Sex?’ I ask, remembering the case-notes. A boy at school. But I feel there’s more, something bigger and more fundamental.
‘Have you ever tried burning a book?’
‘No. How do you go about it?’
‘You have to pour white spirit on it first.’
‘And why would you want to burn a book?’
‘Because it’s full of shit. Right from the beginning.’
She looks at the fresh bandages that Frazer Melville has wrapped around her hands, having swabbed them with antiseptic. ‘The beginning is Genesis. And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. It’s beautiful. It’s beautiful shit. And they expect you to go on believing it even when you know, you know—’ She stops. She stares out of the window at the turbine wheeling its arc, the tilt of birds in the far distance. To migrate or not migrate? More and more, they are having trouble deciding. How small Bethany looks in her big stupid tartan bathrobe. It swallows her up. I reach under my seat for my thunder egg and hold it out to her.
‘This is millions of years old. From the time before humans, before dinosaurs. Before fossils, before life. What happens to someone who burns a Bible because they think Genesis is full of shit ?’
She takes the thunder egg and cradles it in her scabby, wrecked hands. ‘The big bang.’
‘That sounds more like the beginning of something than the end.’
‘It’s both.’
‘What happens to Bethany, during the big bang?’
When she starts talking it comes in a flood that catches me unawares.
‘She gets tied to the stairs. They try to get the Devil out of her and then they tape up her mouth so the Devil can’t curse them and they keep shaking her but the Devil won’t come out so they tie her up and the next morning the Devil’s still there so they shake her some more and that goes on for three days and they won’t let her eat or sleep and she’s tied up the whole time and the Devil won’t come out.’ She stops abruptly and turns the thunder egg in her palms. I’m aware of the grandfather clock ticking. Of the sky outside darkening to a bruised grey. Of birdsong and the taste of whisky in my mouth.
I say, ‘So that night, when your father was away, it was just you and your mother.’
‘I’d got one hand free. But as soon as I get the other one loose she comes in from the kitchen and starts screaming at me. I run for the door but I can’t do it, I’m dizzy. She stops me and she’s going on about the Devil and she won’t shut up, and she blocks the door, she won’t let me past, and then she grabs me by the hair and starts shaking me and screaming at me that I’m an ungrateful evil freak and why don’t I just die. I’m on the floor, doubled up. There’s a screwdriver just lying there. Like it’s waiting for one of us to use it.’ She laughs. ‘Like God put it there.’
I nod. ‘Go on.’
‘So I grab it and jam it into her.’ I try not to picture it. And fail. ‘In her throat. But it doesn’t stop her. She won’t let go of me. So I jam it into her again. When she falls down it’s easier. I just hold her down and keep shoving it into her. Everywhere. And it feels so fucking good.’
Her face has gained colour, as though ignited by the memory. Then it drains away as quickly as it came and she stares at her hands. There is another long silence, yawning out into the space between us. A bird screeches. Then she turns to face me, her eyes vivid with pain.
I roll closer. ‘Your mother’s job was to protect you. That’s what parents are supposed to do. What they did to you was wrong.’ I remember Leonard Krall’s frank, open-faced conviction. Terrible things happen. And God seems to let them happen… Things that don’t make sense to us make sense to Him. Does torturing your own daughter make sense to God? Somehow, Leonard Krall and his wife Karen must have convinced themselves it did. ‘If someone’s done something monstrous to you, I can understand how you’d feel that the rules had changed.’ My heart is hammering. If Karen Krall were standing in front of me now, perhaps I’d want to kill her myself.
‘That’s what happened,’ she says. ‘The rules changed.’
She slumps back in the sofa. Time and thought settle into a solid mass within me, condensing like a cast. Her face is wet. I reach out and dab it with a tissue. She winces, but doesn’t resist.
‘Gabrielle.’ She is whispering, as though she fears someone is listening. ‘I saw us.’
It’s the first time she has used my name. But her voice is faint, like distant wind receding to silence. I wait. There are so many things she could mean. I wait a long time. ‘I saw us. I saw you and me.’
‘Where did you see us?’
‘Up in the sky.’ I wait some more. ‘But we went different ways.’
‘Where did we go?’
‘After the thunder we went to the golden circle. Then we were caught up in the air. But you went to one place and I went to another place.’
‘Look at me, Bethany’. Slowly she lifts her face and our eyes meet. Hers are glittering. ‘Bethany. We won’t go different ways. I won’t leave you.’
She shakes her head slowly, as though it is an immeasurable weight. ‘It doesn’t work that way. But I just want to tell you, it’s OK. You mustn’t feel bad.’
‘About what?’
She seems to be looking right through me, at something on the other side of my head.
‘About the way it ends.’
I enter the kitchen feeling dazed. ‘I just spoke to Ned,’ says Frazer Melville, looking up from his laptop. I have left Bethany on the sofa, staring catatonically at the wall. ‘How did it go with Bethany?’ When I give him a condensed account, he sighs heavily. ‘Jesus. Poor kid. No wonder she’s screwed up.’
‘What’s the news from London?’
‘The seismic data’s been published on the web. The good news is, some prominent scientists are getting on board.’
‘Who?’
‘Kasper Blatt, Akira Kamochi, Walid Habibi, Vance Ozek.’ I can’t put faces to anyone but Kamochi, but the names are all familiar. ‘The bad news is that Ned says the other lobbying they’ve done has hit a brick wall. No one wants to believe it. But the rumour’s spreading on the net and the data’s out there. By the way, he says to watch the news.’ I flick on the TV and zap to BBC World. Another failed assassination attempt on the president of Iran: three bodyguards dead. They show some blood-stained paving. More food riots in South America. But it’s the third, far more outlandish headline, that grabs our attention.
It concerns graffiti in Greenland.
The local correspondent’s report thumbnail-sketches a territory of Inuits with huskies, snowmobiles, alcohol problems and, more recently, livelihoods collapsing due to climate change: a Danish-administered enclave which from June to August is bathed in nonstop, hallucinogenic sunshine. But during the winter months, like now, it’s a land engulfed in darkness, illuminated only by electricity, the moon, and the night sky, with its canopy of stars and the magic swirls of aurora borealis—
And now, as discovered within the last hour, graffiti.
Giant graffiti. A jumble of numbers and letters. Some sort of code. It straddles fifty kilometres of ice cap, far from anywhere habitable. And it glows in the dark. Frazer Melville’s face is breaking into a grin. A satellite image has appeared: a pale blue tracery of semi-legible numbers and characters — seemingly meaningless — etched on the night-darkened landscape. They’re impossible to make out clearly but each cipher, says the anchorman, measures at least ten kilometres high and across. I can see the number 3, and the letters E and B and what looks like a hyphen, and an N. Out there in the darkness, on the Greenlandic ice, somebody with a monstrous ego has been determinedly expressing themselves. Or—
‘Ned must’ve tipped off a local camera crew,’ murmurs Frazer Melville. ‘Just watch.’ The camera lights create a halo around the Greenlandic reporter’s head, broadened and flattened by the TV’s wide-screen function. It’s minus twenty degrees and he’s trembling with cold beneath the fur-trimmed hood of his anorak. Against the velvet Arctic sky, there’s a pulsing light-show of red, blue and green, a swish of colour that makes it look as if the scene has been filtered through the gaudy wing of a giant insect. ‘The characters on the ice are so big you can only see them by satellite,’ he shivers, the northern lights pulsing behind him. ‘Space shots show they weren’t there yesterday but there’s no mistaking them today. They’re calling it the world’s biggest ever publicity stunt. I’m standing here on the down-stroke of the number four. Now this line forms a ridge that stretches all the way over to the horizon, as far as the eye can see.’
The camera pulls back to show it, at the same time revealing the reporter’s female companion, whom he introduces as a local biologist. Bending down, she uses a small ice-pick to detach a chunk of whiteness tinged with a pale mauve glow which she holds out to the camera. She pronounces it to be a phosphorescent liquid that has frozen on contact with the ice. The notion seems to please her profoundly.
‘The dye appears to be organic, and to contain the crushed shells of some form of crustacean. We don’t know exactly what it is yet, we’ve sent samples to be analysed.’ It’s bluish-green with a touch of mauve: a colour Picasso liked. A colour I have seen before. In this very house, in a row of jars.
I laugh. ‘How do you liquidise them?’
‘Cement mixer, at a guess,’ grins Frazer Melville. He couldn’t look more thrilled if he had laid a thunder egg.
A beleaguered-looking man from the Kennedy Space Center materialises. ‘A man rang in. He didn’t give a name, he just said to take a close look at Greenland. Then he gave the co-ordinates and hung up. We zoomed in and saw some faint light-traces. We sharpened them up and realised it was a message.’
Now they’re re-showing satellite pictures of the thin stitching of ghostly ciphers. It’s the kind of writing you imagine a spirit scrawling laboriously across a ouija board. ‘The ice cap, shrouded in the darkness ofwinter, has been used as a giant blackboard,’ says the anchorman back in the studio. ‘But who’s playing teacher? And what’s the lesson? Well, here’s where the geo-graffiti phenomenon gets interesting.’ The camera focuses on the mystery ciphers, with a red graphic creeping across to delineate them more clearly. BH63N-os.24ECHq. ‘To anyone with a background in science, this isn’t even a code. The central ciphers 63N-os.24E are geographical co-ordinates of latitude and longitude, and the final three characters CH4 are the chemical symbol for methane. The location is rig a hundred kilometres off the coast of Norway known as Buried Hope Alpha, so we can assume that’s what the letters B and H stand for. Now the rig’s owned and run by the energy giant Traxorac, who are drilling for frozen methane. We’ll be speaking to them shortly. But first, here’s what Greenpeace had to say.’
‘We like our stunts, but this one isn’t ours,’ says the spokeswoman emphatically but with what might be a hint of regret. ‘I’d say that the message is probably an environmental one and that this rig needs investigating. Methane hydrates are highly volatile and if someone’s decided to draw the world’s attention to the dangers of exploiting them, we’re gald.’
‘Bingo!’ whispers Bethany hoarsely, from the doorway. She’s huddled in a duvet, her face flushed as though she has woken from a nightmare. ‘Look,’ she points at the screen. ‘There’s our rig. The one with the cunt in the crane.’ Frazer Melville pulls up a chair for her and she settles in it heavily. She clutches her bandaged arms to her chest and fixes her eyes on the TV.
Evidence of human endeavour in a hostile natural setting can be a noble sight. Shot from the air, Buried Hope Alpha looks like the ambitious, life-enhancing piece of engineering that it was no doubt conceived to be. ‘Traxorac has absolutely nothing to hide here,’ says the rig’s site controller, Lars Axelsen. The Norwegian stands on the vast platform wearing a hard hat. Behind him, overalled technicians come and go, clutching tools and palmtops. Far below them, the sea is a restless skin of dark blue, close to black, its high waves battering the struts. When asked his reaction to the message on the ice cap, he expresses puzzlement. ‘We’ve sent down a remote-controlled vehicle to assess the picture, but the first reports indicate that everything’s as it should be down there. Security is obviously our number one concern. If there does turn out to be some kind of malfunction, we wouldn’t be able to rule out some form of sabotage. Or hostile intervention. With the terrorist threat out there…’
‘Where would we be without al-Qaeda?’ says Frazer Melville.
Axelsen furrows his brow. ‘I’m not denying accidents do sometimes happen on these rigs, it’s a risk that comes with the territory. But we have all the security systems in place and a system of checks and balances to ensure that…’
‘Blah blah,’ says Bethany, stretching theatrically. She seems to have made a dramatic recovery, but I am still anxious about her state of mind. She wanders over to the fridge and flings the door open wide. ‘I’m hungry. I’m going to make an omelette,’ she announces, dropping the duvet to the floor and reaching for a pack of eggs.
‘Isn’t methane one of the most dangerous greenhouse gases?’ the anchorman is asking.
‘Sure, if it’s not handled correctly,’ responds Axelsen. ‘But we’re extracting the hydrates under controlled conditions, liquefying the gas on the seabed and piping it up. I emphasise that we have nothing to hide. Come and see for yourselves. We’re inviting members of the media here today, to take a look.’
While I zap channels, Bethany swiftly cracks six eggs into a huge Pyrex bowl, flinging the shells into the sink. On CNN, a marine biologist has appeared, with the verdict that the ‘organic dye’ is sea-water in which the ground-up remnants of the phosphorescent crustacean Luxifer gigans are suspended. ‘It may have been spread from a vehicle on the ice cap itself, or offloaded from a helicopter on a carefully configured flight-path.’ An Arctic pilot and a cartographer appear in the studio to discuss the logistics of the airdrop method. I flick over to Euronews, where a weather map shows storms heading for Britain. Bethany pours an alarming amount of salt into her egg mixture and starts whisking manically.
‘Our last normal hours on Earth,’ she says, lighting the gas. She scoops up a hunk of butter with her bandaged fingers and flings it in the pan. When it starts to sizzle, she sloshes in the beaten egg.
‘I’d dispute the word normal. But what do you mean, hours?’
‘It might all happen sooner.’ She sounds hopeful. She fishes two nectarines from the fruit bowl and begins to juggle them. ‘The smell’s getting stronger. I can feel it coming. Maybe it’s all happening sooner than I thought. I’m getting headaches.’ She tosses the nectarines back in the bowl, grabs the remote control and starts zapping. ‘Hey, The Simpsons!’ Lisa and Bart are in a tent. A monster appears. Marge scolds it and tells it to go away. It obeys. ‘Maybe it’ll even hit this afternoon. Can’t you smell it? I can. Rotten eggs.’ Her face has a dark, riotous look. ‘It happens everywhere. Here and in the golden circle. And there came a rushing as of a mighty wind. The sea catches fire. I saw the end of the whole fucking story.’ The omelette starts to bubble. ‘I saw Bethanyland. I saw it with my own eyes.’
The phone rings. I pick up and press the loudspeaker. It’s Ned. His voice urgent. ‘Gabrielle. I’m sorry. But you have to leave, now.’ Frazer Melville draws a deep breath and pinches the bridge of his nose, as though summoning his thoughts to an internal muster station. ‘They raided the anaesthetist’s flat. It’s quite possible they’ve traced him and he’s told them where you are. Take the Nissan that’s outside. The keys are in it. And a mobile. Don’t stop anywhere for long. Keep an eye on the news: you’ve got a TV in there. Head south towards London and we’ll send a helicopter. Find somewhere we can land and send us the coordinates.’
He hangs up. Claustrophobia engulfs me. I force myself to concentrate. ‘We need to avoid the worst of the traffic chaos,’ I say. ‘Because once the story’s out, if other scientists start backing it publicly, which they will when they’ve seen the data, then there’s going to be mass panic. We should head for the Thames estuary. Everyone else will be leaving it.’
‘Helicopters need space,’ says Frazer Melville. ‘It’s got to be a playing field. Or a car park.’
‘The golden circle,’ says Bethany, poking at her burning omel-ette. The smell of the smoke makes me want to retch. ‘That’s where we get caught up in the air. I saw it.’
‘But where is it?’ asks Frazer Melville sharply, snapping off the gas. Bethany is rummaging in a drawer for a fork.
‘How the fuck should I know? It’s golden. It’s a circle. A great big circle.’ She begins shovelling the steaming egg mess into her mouth, straight from the pan. ‘Christ, I could eat a fucking horse.’
‘We need a satellite map,’ I say. Seconds later, on Frazer Melville’s laptop, we have the British Isles, seen from space. ‘Now find it,’ I tell Bethany.
She plonks the frying pan on the table, perches on a chair, and points her laden fork at the screen. ‘There,’ she says, indicating a section of south-east London. Frazer Melville zooms in.
‘But that’s the East End,’ he says, staring blankly. ‘That’s the ‘ ‘Yes,’ she says non-committally, still eating. ‘That’s it. That’s what I saw. That’s the golden circle.’ She wipes her mouth on her sleeve, leaving a greasy trail. ‘That’s where we get caught up in the air.’
Frazer Melville zooms in further, until there’s no mistaking it. I should have guessed. The Paralympics were held there some months after my accident. I watched some of the games on TV in rehab with several other newly injured patients. We were all cheered and energised by the stream of wheelchairs racing around the track at dizzying speeds — though no one warned us about the slump that would hit afterwards, when we were struggling with floor-to-chair transfer techniques and failing over and over again. We christened it Post-Paralympic Inadequacy Syndrome, which allowed us to joke about something that wasn’t funny. A necessary condition of psychic survival.
‘You could land a helicopter there easily,’ says Frazer Melville. He has been Googling. ‘There’s a concert next week, but nothing listed before then. It’s empty.’
Hard to imagine, though I read that after the 2012 Games they dismantled half of it, and sold the seats.
A depth charge of fear vibrates its way up from my smashed vertebra. My breath shakes as I exhale, as though I’ve been punched in the chest. It’s odd, and new, to want so fiercely to live. But the smell of burnt egg has got to me. Hurtling to the bathroom, I throw up the entire contents of my stomach. I throw up until my head is spinning furiously on the axle of its own emptiness. When I breathe in again, a weird, self-disgusted despair has engulfed me. It’s a despair that’s intimately connected to my Alex-dream. I don’t know how, or why. But the knowledge is rooted too deep for me to argue with.
When I come back, Frazer Melville is heaving bags out of the back door and into a grey hatchback. Everything looks different. As though this is a place I am remembering rather than seeing, a place I am looking back on from a time in the distant future. There is an invisible line across my abdomen beneath which I feel nothing. But now, above it, in the section that has nerves, a muscle clenches like a sea anemone. I spread the flat of my palm across the bare skin and I can almost feel an alien growth burgeoning like a parasite that has a knowledge I don’t possess, a brain of its own, a will.
It’s screaming no.