Liz Jensen - The Rapture

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

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

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

‘Can you talk me through what’s going on here?’

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

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

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

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

‘What do you see there?’

She looks at me sideways, suddenly furtive. ‘Bethanyland.’

‘What’s Bethanyland like?’

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

‘Lake Bethany?’

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

‘A bleak landscape.’

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

‘How was it for you when Joy left?’

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

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

I feel oddly slapped. ‘I ’m listening.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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