Liz Jensen - The Rapture

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

‘So why look?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Child B’s father’s church believes in the Tribulation.’

‘That’s the seven years of Hell on Earth thing?’

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

‘That’s the deus ex machina divine teleportation system?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Does your kid go in for this stuff?’

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

‘She killed her mother? Christ. You didn’t tell me that bit.’ He looks uneasy. ‘Are you surrounded by murderers in that place?’

I shrug. ‘I don’t think of them that way. They’re just disturbed. And it’s my job. Anyway, what I’m getting at is that Child B had — has — religion issues. To put it mildly. The fall of the Rio Christ was to her what 9/11 was to all the anti-Western Muslims we saw dancing for joy that day. And not just because she claims to have predicted it. If her father visited, I’d have a lot of questions for him.’

‘You can hardly blame him for keeping clear, if she killed his wife.’

‘Things are always more complex than they look,’ I say. ‘I’m wondering about the healthiness of his role in her life. And her mother’s.’ We consider this for a moment and then I point my fork at him. ‘Eschatology.’

‘Greek. The doctrine of last things.’

‘Correct. If you’re an eschatologist, and you believe the Apocalypse is about to happen, you’re happy. You’re going to be saved. But as a sinner, how would you spend your last moments on the Earth as we know it?’

‘I’d do exactly what I’m doing now,’ he says, amused. ‘ Eat spaghetti alle vongole in enjoyable and combative and extremely attractive company. No, scrub that. I’d take the said company to its natural psychic habitat, which is probably Paris because I’m guessing you’re partly French, with a name like Gabrielle.’

‘French-Canadian.’

‘OK then, Montreal. Which doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. But we’d order ourselves a gastronomic extravaganza in a Michelin-starred restaurant, and finish it with industrial doses of Belgian chocolate.’

Something about the physicist doesn’t add up. ‘Are you flirting with me?’

‘Well, if I am, you started it. You invited it. Yes maybe I am. In a safe kind of way.’

I flare. ‘Right. So being paralysed from the ninth vertebra down makes me a safe kind of girl? Thanks for the compliment.’

‘I didn’t mean that. I meant… I’m flirting in a non-threatening kind of way.’

‘The way gay men do?’ A wild guess.

Interestingly, the physicist looks thoughtful rather than outraged. ‘How do gay men flirt?’

‘They talk a lot and they give compliments but they never follow through on the physical side. Is that what you meant by unthreatening?’

‘I read somewhere that thirty per cent of people have had at least one homosexual experience, and I must say I was quite surprised the figure was that low. But the trouble is, in my case, I was always far too attached to the mammary gland.’

‘I noticed.’

‘So you are a mind-reader.’

I laugh. ‘No, I’ve got a pair of eyes, though, and I’m a normal woman. Or I used to be.’ I stop, appalled that I’ve just said it aloud. It isn’t funny. What am I doing, discussing my breasts with a physicist, when nothing works below the bellybutton?

‘The fact is, I’ve been quite, er, reserved on that front since my marriage broke up,’ confesses the physicist.