Liz Jensen - The Rapture

‘Disabled?’ I offer, to regain control, to buy time, as we round a bend. ‘ Confined to a wheelchair?’

‘I was going to say challenged ,’ she ripostes merrily. ‘Or differently abled, yeah?’ It seems that today is a good day.

‘I’m fine with paralysed.’

She stops and closes her eyes. ‘He was driving, right?’ she says, knowledgeably.

My brain jams, then restarts with an internal thud, catapulting me into the offensive. ‘OK, so tell me more,’ I say. ‘Since you know, let’s hear the rest.’ But I immediately regret it. In giving in to my anger, I’ve betrayed myself.

‘I can’t see the details. But I know the result.’

So do I, and so does everybody, big deal, I think, and move on. But how can she know who was driving? Because men usually drive? Just another ‘lucky guess’? For a few minutes there’s no sound but the crunch of gravel under her feet, and the quieter press of my wheels. If I give her something, she might give me something in return.

‘OK,’ I say. ‘Here’s the short version. It’s night-time. He’s driving, as you suspected.’

‘Knew.’

‘Well, you knew right. Anyway he loses control, the car veers off the road, it rolls over a few times, I land in some mud, and when I wake up in hospital they ask if I’m aware of a loss of feeling anywhere.’

My voice has stayed calm but my heart is bashing and I’m unbearably hot, and suffused with a feeling of disgust, as though I have rolled over a slug and it’s stuck to my wheel and any minute I’ll feel the slime of its prolapsed innards against my palm. Next to me, Bethany nods as if recognising the scenario. Nothing fazes her. On the contrary, what I’ve said seems to give her nourishment.

‘But it was your fault, right?’ Like a lot of disturbed kids, Bethany has a sure instinct for locating one’s jugular vein. I shut my eyes and stop the wheelchair. When I open them again, Rafik is at my side. I breathe in and out slowly.

‘In a way it was, and in another way it wasn’t,’ I say as evenly as I can, moving on. ‘Depending on the mood I’m in on the day, Bethany. I wonder if there’s anything that feels familiar in that, when you look at your own life?’

But she isn’t going to be side-tracked in that direction. Her refusal to countenance the past has shown no signs of erosion. The occasional biblical quotation — usually citing chapter and verse from Ezekiel, The malonians or the Book of Revelation — is the closest she comes to revealing influences from her life in the outside world. It could be months, or even years, before Bethany decides she trusts somebody enough to talk about her parents. If she ever does. And why would she? She’d have everything to lose, and precious little to gain. If whatever happened to her was bad enough to prompt her to kill her mother, then convince her that she herself had died—

‘So just how paralysed are you?’ she asks. I’ve recovered now.

‘My legs don’t function,’ I answer, pushing my wheels faster. Rafik holds back; she stays alongside. ‘I can’t stand up or walk, but I can still swim. It’s my arms that do the work.’

‘She can still swim,’ she says, as though pondering it. ‘But can she have sex?’

I take a breath. It’s the question everyone secretly wants to ask, in a normal world. But a maximum-security forensic hospital for criminally insane minors is not a normal world. ‘I have no feelings below the waist. I’m what’s called a T9 paraplegic, complete,’ I reply. ‘Meaning nothing much happening from the belly-button down. Or thereabouts.’ Slowly, and with much experimentation, I discovered in rehab that I can still, just about, experience arousal of sorts — though most of it seems to take place in my head, via my breasts. Not something I feel the need to share with the suddenly inquisitive Bethany Krall.

‘I’m wondering why you ask,’ I continue carefully, grateful for once that there’s no eye contact. In opening the door to a discussion of her own sexuality and experience, have I launched her on a ghost-train? But she seems not to have heard, or has chosen not to answer.

‘I didn’t choose this,’ I say softly — though in my dark raging moments I fear otherwise. ‘But I can live with it.’ Can I? As a vision of making love with Alex on the poker table enters my head, my ribcage tugs inward like I’m wearing a corset that’s being tightened by a cruel Elizabethan. ‘Maybe you can under- stand that? Spur-of-the-moment, random actions that have lifelong consequences?’ Her mother hovers between us but Bethany resists the bait. ‘You’ve been at Oxsmith for two years now. But do you understand why you’re here?’

She laughs, but it’s mirthless. ‘I’m here because of people like you refusing to see what’s going on even when it’s staring you in the face. Much easier to lock me up than to listen to what I’m saying.’ Suddenly she’s on a furious roll. ‘You pretend things aren’t happening because that’s what you want to believe, and by the time you do, it’s too fucking late. The tornado in Scotland. You want to think it was a lucky guess. You’re welcome to. But I saw it. And then it happened.’

‘Like you said yourself: a lucky guess.’ I see Karen Krall’s bloodied face: waxy, like a melted doll’s. You can’t help wondering what sort of force Bethany needed to ram the screwdriver into her eye socket like that. What sort of noise the puncture would make. ‘But how do you see your future?’ I ask, to take my mind off it.

‘You mean, do I want to leave Oxsmith one day? Be released into the community? Get married, become a mum, lead a normal nine-to-five life — all the things little girls are supposed to want?’

‘Little girls?’

‘Cut the crap. I mean those moronic teens in your moronic teen group talking about their moronic boyfriends and their moronic sex and their crack-head retard babies.’

‘Forget about the other girls’ ambitions, Bethany, whatever you think they are. What do you want?’

She stops, and together we look at the wall of red creeper. ‘If I had a baby I’d call it Felix. That means happy, right? It would be kind of an ironic name.’ I wait for more, thinking: the name I always had in mind was Max. ‘But I won’t be having a baby.’ Me neither. They said I nearly died, there was ‘no way of saving anything’. Anything : an interesting euphemism. No Max. Not now, not ever.

‘But how can you know you’ll never have children?’

‘What’s the point, when the world’s fucked? I’d have to be a sadist.’ Harish Modak and the Planetarians would agree with her. They’re singing from the same hymn-sheet.

‘I can think of a million reasons,’ I say. A foolish reflex, because if she were to call me on it, I am not sure I could name a single one. But Bethany’s inner whirlwind has moved on. She has leaned down, and I feel her breath on the back of my head. This is her favourite way to threaten me.

‘Me getting out of this place all depends on you, Wheels,’ she whispers, coming so close that her mouth nuzzles the hair by my ear. Her babyish, hoarse voice worms deep into me, insistent as an exotic parasite. ‘I’d say it depends on how good you are at your so-called job.’ A familiar sting of pain travels up from my smashed ninth vertebra to my neck. I shudder it away and shift in my chair. I’ve learned over the past two years that when half of you is dead, the other half can come violently, almost malevolently alive. ‘Joy McConey got nine out of ten but in the end it wasn’t enough, she just wasn’t up to it. Didn’t have the nerve. She’s paying for it now. But maybe you’ll be the one. Have you ever thought that you were brought here for a purpose?’