Liz Jensen - The Rapture

The physicist’s look is so unprocessed I can’t take it, because other people’s pity is unbearable. So is sympathy. And so is moral disapproval. I look away.

I have not told him that most of all, on those long inner journeys, I imagined a boy called Max with blue eyes and brown hair. I saw him first as a baby, and then growing up. When he was tiny I gave him crayons to draw with and clay to mush, then later I showed him the work of painters and sculptors, I taught him to fry eggs, watched him battling with scuba gear, listened to the story of how he fell in love.

The physicist has taken my hand. He is stroking it. He is looking into my eyes so intently that I have to gabble.

‘Afterwards, right from the start,’ I go on, quickly, to get it over with, ‘I wanted two things. I wanted to work again, as soon as possible. And I wanted to walk.’ He nods again, and turns his face away because I suspect there are tears, which he has correctly guessed I would not wish to see, because they’d make me think less of him, and perhaps hate him too, to the point of violence.

‘Who wouldn’t?’ he mutters. He had better be very careful here. Does he realise that if he feels sorry for me, I will get out my thunder egg and smash his head in with it?

‘At which point the very nice and well-meaning therapist invited me to "untangle" what was "realistic" and what wasn’t,’ I go on, determined to get this over with. I take another swoosh of wine. ‘Untangle, unravel, unpack, deconstruct. You get to hate the jargon, when you’re not the one who’s using it. Actually you hate it when you are too. She got me filling in the kind of psychological questionnaires I used to design, right at the beginning of my career.’

‘Humiliating?’ he asks. He’s blinking. They told us in rehab to watch out for people who want to help you, who make a beeline for you because you are needy, who want to be your saviour. Cripple pervs. If that’s what this is about, he can leave.

‘It was humiliating to begin with. But then interesting. Denial of reality can be helpful. Something blind and ungracious and determined took over. I made it take over. I realised that if I could work myself into a kind of righteous rage, almost a political rage, I could do things. I became evangelical about life going on as normal. I was going to start again, faster than anyone else, better than anyone else, and what’s more, in a new place. I didn’t want to be judged against what I was before. I wanted to be among strangers who’d never known me as someone who could walk. I wanted to present this as a fait accompli . I wanted to say, here I am, and this is what I am, so fuck you.’

The physicist smiles. ‘I can see that. And that’s one of the reasons—’ He stops. ‘You’re cleverer than I am, Gabrielle. And you have a mean streak. So listen. You’re not to ridicule me and make me feel like a twat.’

‘Just please don’t tell me you admire me for my courage.’

‘I wasn’t going to,’ he says, standing up and moving his chair away from me. ‘Put your arms round my neck,’ he says, leaning down. I reach up to him. The physicist’s chest is broad, as warm as bread from the oven. I can feel the thump of his heart. Which means he can feel mine too. ‘Hold on tight.’ He’s clasping my whole torso close to his. ‘I was going to say,’ he says, lifting me bodily out of the chair and settling me against him with my knees over the crook of his arm. He is big and I am small but I’m still worried that I must feel like a sack of potatoes though he bears my weight as if it’s nothing. Then his face is next to mine and he’s rocking us both. We stay like that for a while, swaying together in the warm night air. The sky has darkened and the moon is a pallid crescent. It’s absurd. It’s romantic. It’s ridiculous. I love it and I want to die, but not in the way I usually want to die. ‘What I was going to say was, it’s one of the reasons I keep wanting to do this.’

‘What, weight-training?’ Why can’t I stop myself?

‘Spoil it again and I’ll drop you. Just shut up and listen because I’m being romantic here.’ Yes, I think. You are. And I can’t handle it. It will kill me. It will kill my belief that I am no longer a woman. No, worse, it will revive the hope that I am, and then all that can happen is that it will be shredded. I close my eyes. ‘It’s one of the reasons I keep wanting to hold you in my arms,’ says the physicist. ‘And then kiss you.’

‘Did you like that?’ he says finally, as our lips part. It was spectacularly potent. I am like a recovering alcoholic going back on the booze. I’d forgotten what kissing was like, what kissing does to the rest of you. But my body — what’s left of it — hadn’t. Hasn’t. Is now in a turmoil of wanting, and not knowing how to get, how to have.

‘Frazer Melville.’ It’s as though his name has been trapped inside me and his kiss has released it. He settles me on the sofa, still holding me close. ‘Frazer Melville, Frazer Melville, Frazer Melville.’ Like my Spanish mantra, it’s similar to rolling a strange taste around on my tongue, a taste I could get addicted to. I want more. Of his name, of everything, of him.

He pulls back to look at me. ‘Answer my question.’ He sounds proud but a little pinch of worry has appeared on the bridge of his nose. ‘Did you like it?’

When no human being of the opposite sex, public health professionals excepting, has touched you intimately in two years—

The feel of another body. The press of lips. It’s too much for me. I am done for.

‘Well,’ I say, trying to sound hard-boiled but failing. ‘The thing is, I’m supposed to have an insight into people’s psyches. And an understanding of body language and the human impulse. It’s the basic job description.’

‘Meaning?’

‘That if you were giving out any signals, I missed them.’

‘But your lack of professional skills aside, my question was: did you like it?’

‘No. I hated it,’ I say. I am aware of the muscles around my mouth. They are doing something they’re not used to doing. It’s not that I don’t smile, I realise. It’s that I don’t normally smile this wide. It’s the mad banana smile from my nephew’s birthday card. No, I didn’t pick up his signals. Not properly. But he picked up mine: the ones I only half-knew I was giving. Oh, OK. The cleavage thing, the make-up, the perfume, the straight-out-of-hospital-into-green-stilettos — I know. But. ‘But just to be sure, why not do it again two or three more times,’ I say coolly, pulling a swatch of hair across my bald patch. ‘And I’ll let you know my final decision.’

In rehab, I read a manual about paralysis and sexuality, entitled Sex Matters . A good, self-explanatory title, involving a mini-pun, as titles often do. Sex Matters recommends that you and your partner take things slowly. That when contemplating sex, you explain to him, if he doesn’t know already, what that might involve. What can go wrong, what positions might be favoured, what embarrassing accidents might occur. Screw that. Screw taking things slowly. Despite the bandaged wound on my thigh, and the fact I must be extra careful with it, and despite the bald patch on my head, I want to know what it’s like. Now. With the physicist. With the physicist Frazer Melville. Whether he is ready for it or not.

‘Kiss me again, Frazer Melville,’ I tell him. ‘And then take me to bed.’

Later, as I fall asleep next to him, with the fan churning the hot night-air across our skin, I know something important. I am still a woman whose body can experience physical delight. A woman who has missed, more than she ever admitted, the intimacy, tenderness and intensity of sex. And if her lower section can’t muster an orgasm, her nipples and brain most certainly can.